YOUNG, VULNERABLE AND USED AS PAWNS BY DRUG GANG LORDS

The Exploited is an investigation by Sean O’Neil exposing the prevalence of human trafficking and modern slavery in our communities where victims, and their abusers, are hiding in plain sight

Criminal exploitation is an increasing avenue for organised crime gangs (OCGs) to force their victims into Scotland, including Aberdeen, Inverness, Tayside and Fife.

Everything from drug trafficking to shoplifting is a market for criminals where they think there is money to be made.

Drugs continue to be the predominant market for criminal exploitation.

One of the most prevalent forms of criminal exploitation detected around Inverness and Aberdeen is “county lines” drug running.

The county lines setup involves a network where gangs exploit the vulnerable and coerce them into trafficking drugs from cities, across borders and local authority boundaries to rural locations.

In Inverness and the north-east the majority of victims are male British teenagers, often as young as 15, recruited in London and forced to supply the markets north of the border.

Human trafficking officers are discovering that teenage boys are being shipped up to the Inverness area from English cities on a regular basis to feed the drugs market in the Highlands.

A worrying development in the county lines trade around Inverness is the appearance of vulnerable victims from Dundee beginning to show up in the city to move drugs.

Detective Inspector Calum Smith believes this could be evidence of London gangs with connections in Tayside recruiting Dundee youngsters and pushing them further north.

He said: “The assessment is that they are being recruited by some of these gangs from London and are then being sub-recruited and making their way to Inverness.”

Detective Superintendent Fil Capaldi backed up his colleague’s assessment of the prolific nature of the drug trafficking networks operating in the regions.

“What we’re finding in the north, north-east is county lines,” he said.

The cannabis farm industry is exploding in Scotland with officers uncovering new locations nearly every single day.

The set-up of such money-making operations makes them rife for abuse and exploitation with OCGs able to move their victims from farm to farm.

Traffickers prey on a victim’s desperation and a desire for a better life to coerce them into working in the illegal industry.

Gangs smuggle victims in from countries like Vietnam and the person is in a debt bond to the traffickers or loan sharks.

Upon arrival in Scotland they are taken to cannabis farms and told they will be paid to look after plants.

As soon as they accept work from the OCG they are caught in a cycle.

DS Capaldi said: “He or she will do whatever it takes in order for that money to go back to their country of origin – and the OCGs know that.

“On the one hand you’ve got family expecting you to step up and respond to the money they’ve paid out and on the other hand you’ve got the OCGs looking to recycle you as often as they can.”

During a cannabis farm bust this April, which must remain unidentified due to legal proceedings, a victim was recovered who had previously been working on a farm in England but was unable to escape the cycle.

“His primary focus was to earn money and return it to his family,” said DS Capaldi. “And he also owns a debt bond to the OCG who are helping him out by doing this for him.”

Cases like that referenced by DS Capaldi have been witnessed across Scotland.

Kimi Jolly, founder of the East and Southeast Asian Scotland (ESAS) charity, says her organisation is aware of many cases where victims have been criminalised.

One was 22-year-old Phuc Duck Ngo, who paid to travel from Vietnam to Scotland believing he would find work in a nail bar but ended up being caught in a human trafficking raid on the Fife flat where he’d been put up. Officers recovered marijuana plants and cash and despite evidence that Ngo was only a pawn in a wider operation he was arrested and taken to court.

In February 2020, after spending less than 72 hours at the cannabis farm, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

The human rights advocate believes the criminalisation of victims caught up in these illegal industries is a problem in the UK and Vietnam.

“What a lot of these smugglers do, they are very clever, they don’t do these things (work in cannabis farms) themselves,” Kimi explained. “They usually identify a strong character that is also easy to

manipulate and they get them to head these operations.

“They are not actually traffickers, they are one of the people that are being trafficked.

“A lot of the time they will ask young men to do it.

“They give them supervisory roles in the cannabis farms.”

This set-up by the OCGs allows them to maintain a distance from the running of the cannabis farms for whenever police raids may occur.

For hardened crime bosses, human exploitation is a low-risk, high-reward sector of their operation.

DS Capaldi explained that OCGs are always looking to diversify their interests. “The people who are involved in smuggling drugs across Europe, smuggling guns, involved in counterfeit goods, involved in small boats bringing migrants to the

UK are the same people that are involved in human trafficking and modern slavery,” he said. “Where there’s money you’ll find organised crime at its roots.”

Globally, human trafficking is thought to be a multi-billion-dollar industry.

The majority of victims being exploited by county lines gangs are born and raised in the UK and could help explain the growing statistics for underage youths believed to be potential victims of criminal exploitation.

Often they come from troubled backgrounds which makes them easy targets for criminals.

In a vicious cycle, similar to that seen in sex trafficking, the exploited youths can become the exploiters as they get older.

The system becomes a process of victims working their way up the chain by

identifying potential mules younger than themselves that they can push.

Across the UK in 2020, there were 1,544 victims of exploitation flagged as county lines cases – of this total, a staggering 1,371 were under the age of 18.

Justine Currell, director at modern slavery charity Unseen, believes OCGs have become more reliant on criminal exploitation in Scotland amid the pandemic.

“For Scotland the biggest type of cases are related to labour but that’s closely followed by criminal exploitation and that’s what we’ve seen throughout probably the last nine to 12 months,” she said.

“A decline in labour, even though it’s still the most prevalent across the UK, but an increase in cases involving criminal exploitation and sexual exploitation – and that’s really concerning.”

CRUSHED: Smuggled workers are farmed out to various criminal enterprises.