Inside the seedy sex rings operating illegally in Australian by Asian gangsters: 60 Minutes

Vulnerable sex workers are forced to serve customers day and night from seedy hotel rooms, while international sex traffickers in Australia go with impunity by abusing the country’s weak visa rules.

The young women are brought to Australia through so-called visa farms at no upfront cost, which are run by immigration agents who work for Asian human trafficking organizations.

An undercover investigation by 60 Minutes found that most women are being lied to by recruiters about what they would do in Australia – promising to make a lot of money.

But with little English, they are at the mercy of the mobsters who confiscate their passports upon arrival and demand that they repay the money they spent to buy their plane tickets and visas.

The young woman’s services are openly advertised online.

An undercover “customer” for the Nine program called one such number in the town of Townsville in North Queensland and immediately received a text message with the rates for half an hour and an hour of sex with a hotel location and room number.

When he entered, the man was greeted by a scantily clad Asian woman who listed the rates for sexual services.

Queensland Detective Brad Phelps, of the Major Crime Squad, said the women were “moved like cattle across the country to various motels” along the east coast of Australia.

He said they got a pittance, or maybe nothing at all, while making millions for the heads of the sex trade, who are believed to be Chinese citizens.

“They really are treated like the lowest of the low and people are making huge profits from this exploitation,” he said.

Indicating the magnitude of such operations, leaked 2018 South Australian police briefings found a hotel room crammed with seven Chinese sex workers and identified 190 cell phones used to sell the operation’s services.

A South Korean woman named Karen (not her real name) only had new two English words when she started working in illegal brothels in 2014 – “Hello and hello.”

She was promised huge amounts of money and fair working conditions before she left, but after arriving in Melbourne she was faced with a grim reality.

Her passport as taken by her pimp and told it would not be returned until her ‘debt’ was paid.

“I would put on makeup and start at 8am and work until 1am,” she said, adding that one shift was 25 hours.

Chief Inspector Jayne Crossling, who oversees the AFP’s human trafficking division, said many of the women are deceptively recruited in their countries of origin.

“They have no idea they might end up in the sex industry,” she said.

Or maybe they knew they were getting into the sex industry, and when they arrive in Australia they actually find that they are in fact in debt bondage or that the unreasonableness of what they are being asked is just way too much of an exaggeration.

“They are being asked to provide more services that they once agreed to.

Debt settlements are all illegal under Australian human trafficking laws.

Undercover agents posing as Asian sex workers trying to enter Australia.

He was told to apply for a refugee visa, but not with the expectation of getting one.

Rather, the goal was to get a bridging visa, which would allow them to work for three years while the main application was pending.

Another was told that if they got a student visa, they didn’t have to go to class.

‘You don’t have to go to school. You can go once a week. It doesn’t matter if you don’t go at all,’ the officer told them.

‘There are many such schools in terms of attendance percentages, literally visa schools.’

Former deputy secretary of the immigration service, Abul Rizvi, said such looting has grown enormously since 2014 under the former Morrison government.

He estimated that at least 30,000 foreigners were working in Australia, under false pretenses.

This figure includes sex workers, as well as farm workers and other occupations.