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For generations, starry-eyed young women have been among humanity’s most vulnerable to a slimy sales pitch.
It is the pimp’s credo: Tell them what they want to hear. Money, fame, luxury, whatever seals the deal.
And modelling has long been a lure for the naive, with many of the worst sexual predators actually being legitimate actors in the fashion industry. Hidden in their opaque tales are the treble hooks.
For the young women ensnared in a sickening nightmare in Myanmar, only death ended their ordeals.
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Vera Kravtsova, 26, was a striking young Belarusian woman eager to make a name for herself on the world’s catwalks. A university graduate, she had left Minsk for St. Petersburg before she saw an ad on the web looking for models in exotic Bangkok, Thailand.
SHATTERED DREAMS
It was too good to be true. The Southeast Asian country was lush and gifted with warm temperatures.
“She flew to Bangkok for a job interview, but instead of working on the runway, she was taken to Myanmar and turned into a sex slave,”theMASHnews outlet reported.“Her duties included being beautiful, serving her ‘masters’ sexually, and scamming rich people.”
Myanmar hovers somewhere between a bizarre dictatorship and a criminal wild west. Pretty blond Kravtsova’s harrowing existence carried very little glamour, only misery.
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According toThe UK Sun, after arriving inBangkokand meeting the “modelling agents,” Kravtsova was snatched and forcefully taken to neighbouring Myanmar around Sept. 12. There, traffickers used her in a scam centre where she was held captive.
HUMAN TRAFFICKERS
The country’s frontier is infamous for the call centres, staffed with pretty female foreigners who had fallen for the same empty promises. Victims who escaped the traffickers’ clutches said they had been forced to give up their passports and cellphones.
Once trapped in the scam centres – controlled by Chinese triads and rogue Burmese militias – there is no way to call for help.
Kidnapped workers are controlled with torture and extortion. Victims are also threatened with prostitution or worse, organ harvesting, if they don’t make enough money from the scam calls.
For some, the vile threats became perverse promises.
Authorities estimate there could be as many as 100,000 slaves kept in the remote, well-hidden factories.
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Vera Kravtsova was told she had to be “beautiful and extort money from wealthy clients.” Reports suggested that she agreed to do what the traffickers wanted because she was terrified. Eventually, it went south, and the money stopped coming in. She ran out of clients.
Several weeks later, her worried family was told that she had been found dead. Traffickers left a message with the family that if they wanted her body back for burial, it would cost them $500,000.
‘WENT SILENT’
They didn’t agree and later received a sinister message informing them, “We cremated her.”
“Vera went silent in early October,” Russian media outletSHOTreported. “A little later, unknown individuals contacted her family, informing them that she had been sold for her organs and her body had been cremated.”
According to media reports, her slave masters eventually tired of her and Kravtsova was murdered somewhere in the northern jungles. Her valuable organs were then reportedly removed by a rogue surgeon and sold on the black market.
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Kravtsova has not been the only young woman trafficked in Myanmar in recent weeks. Dashinima Ochirnimayeva, 24, from Siberia, was also recruited as a model and was “slated for sale for her organs,” according toMash.
In the end, the only thing that saved Ochirnimayeva was that Russian diplomats were tipped off about her ordeal and rescued her. She, too, had accepted a “modelling job” before being illegally smuggled across the border to Myanmar.
One account said: “Upon arrival in Thailand, the Chita woman was taken to a special camp on the Myanmar border. There, people become slaves and serve their ‘masters’. They are forced to engage in fraud.
MIRACLE ESCAPE
“Young, beautiful women are recruited as ‘models’ to swindle people out of money with their faces and bodies, while the rest are trained in texts and extorting cash.”
The Russian Ambassador to Thailand, Yevgeny Tomikhin, was personally involved in the successful attempt to free Ochirnimayeva.
He said the woman had been “deceived into travelling from Thailand to Myanmar in early September for alleged forced labour in the notorious call centres.”
She reportedly took the job after being offered it on Telegram. The Siberian was lucky to escape. Other young women like Vera Kravtsova, not so much.
MY NEW BOOK: INSIDE THE MIND OF THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Cop, devoted father, gruff neighbour, serial killer.
DeAngelo has also been known as the Golden State Killer, the Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist and the Visalia Ransacker. Between 1974 and 1986, DeAngelo committed at least 13 murders, along with dozens of rapes, burglaries and other crimes across California.
Suddenly, in 1986, the murders stopped, but the taunts did not. DeAngelo was finally nabbed on April 24, 2018. The serial killer was ultimately identified via the use of DNA in the pioneering use of forensic genetic genealogy.
WHAT DROVE GOLDEN STATE KILLER?
Now, I take a deep dive into DeAngelo, from his birth south of Buffalo, to his high school days in California, his service during the Vietnam War and the bizarre kinks that drove him.
OrderInside the Mind of the Golden State Killer: Joseph James DeAngelofor your autumnal true crime reading.
