BLINDING neon lights, deafening music and scores of boozing tourists staggering through one of Thailand’s most notorious party cities has created a sick breeding ground for sex traffickers.
The world’s sex tourism capital is hiding a sinister shadow behind its glittering facade: a hotbed for ruthless gangs eyeing up their next target.
The grisly trade’s was laid bare when a sex trafficking gang leader dubbed the alongside her husband last month.
Achareeya Spurr, 49, and Chin Ping, 56, were thrown behind bars for trafficking 22 women from to the UK in a single year.
The sex workers were left with eye-watering £25,000 debts despite working gruelling 14-hour days as they were paid as little as £50 per shift.
Experts fear the disturbing Brothel Queen case could just be the tip of the iceberg.
Andrew Wallis OBE, a sex trafficking expert who advised on Britain’s Modern Slavery Act, told The Sun: “That case will be replicated the length and breadth of the UK.”
Spurr is one of a new generation of trafficking kingpins bringing women to the UK from Asia to work while facing brutal conditions.
Last year, fellow brothel madam Jie Zhang, 45, was jailed after putting women to work in erotic massage “temples” and taking up to 60 per cent of their pay as part of the sexually exploitative “Cloud 9” gang.
In Thailand, the first step in a sex worker’s perilous descent into the trafficking trade can be found in Thai party towns, Matt Friedman, founder of anti-human slavery organisation Mekong Club, said.
He explained how it was one of the most effective ways recruiters lure in young women – even more than social media.
The analyst told The Sun: “You have these people who basically will go through the girl’s bars and identify somebody who they think meets a certain expectation.
“They determine the extent to which they have English… and they’ll talk them into this type of a scenario.”
The Sun revealed in August how to sell their daughters into the sex trade – some of which end up being trafficked to the UK.
Once targets are sent to the UK, they are usually met at the airport, put into a van, and stripped of their passport and phones.
In extreme cases, women are unable to leave grim prostitution dungeons for months at a time, Friedman said.
One of the main things traffickers use to keep women in check is debt.
Friedman said debts can be as high as £100,000 – but are never properly recorded to make sure they can’t be paid off.
The victims of Spurr and her husband – a Brit national originally from China – were hit with debts of tens of thousands of pounds, prosecutors said.
Friedman continued: “They don’t really tell you how much you’ve paid against the debt.
“So if you’re making money for them, it could last for years because it’s never really gonna be paid off, it’s part of the scam.
“The indebtedness is the justification, but the indebtedness allows them for the threats.”
The so-called Brothel Queen also coerced women by threatening to report them to immigration services if they complained.
Prosecutors said a total of 22 women were brought to the UK from Thailand between January and October 2025 – while two others were transported from Denmark and Scotland.
Spurr also used social media to deceive, entice and threaten her victims.
She recruited Thai sex workers for the brothels through flashy videos on TikTok, promising riches if they moved to the UK.
Wallis said: “Social media is a means of recruitment, a means of control, and a means of advertising.”
He said recruiters often threaten to send compromising material of their sex work to relatives if they don’t behave.
“So it has become the means in which to sell more, control more and deceive more,” he added.
Wallis pointed to another sinister method traffickers use – the aftermath of earthquakes or tsunamis.
“If there is a natural disaster, usually the first people on the ground are the traffickers, because they know that those people are vulnerable,” Wallis warned.
“And they will prey on vulnerable women and girls and move them.”
Experts said earthquakes and tsunamis often rip apart families and can destroy homes, workplaces and opportunities for poorer members of society.
This makes the individual vulnerable – but also desperate for cash.
“Once you start removing those things, you’re incredibly vulnerable, and traffickers just play on that vulnerability,” Wallis said.
In March last year, a huge 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand, killing over 5,000 people and displacing many more.
Wallis said recruiters would most likely have flocked to the scene in the aftermath to prey on women in their most desperate moments.
He stressed: “If your options are poverty, poverty, poverty, or here’s this offer of a job in the West, human nature kicks in.”
Some women are tricked into coming to the UK with promises of regular jobs, while others know they are coming for sex work.
But even those who know what to expect are subjected to much worse conditions than promised: they are controlled, paid nothing, and trapped.
In either case, it is a crime of modern slavery.
A decade ago, Britain’s Modern Slavery Act 2015 was praised across the world as a game-changing crackdown on a horrific crime.
Politicians joined forces to tackle evil human traffickers and modern-day slave masters, giving frontline charities the power to help thousands of victims escape abuse and rebuild their lives.
But 10 years later, Wallis said the uncomfortable truth is that modern slavery hasn’t been wiped out.
New official figures show referrals into the government’s National Referral Mechanism skyrocketed to a record 23,411 in 2025 – a massive 22 per cent surge in just one year.
The proportion of those who reported sexual exploitation has remained roughly the same in the past few years.
Wallis said authorities are doing less to combat it than they were a decade ago – despite the problem being just as bad if not worse.
He said: “Modern slavery used to be on the National Threat Assessment, which meant it sat as a priority on every single police force’s threat assessment… that’s no longer the case.
“I think what we’ve seen in the last nine or 10 years, is a growing scepticism by government… you have less focus on policing.
“We used to have what was called MSOIC, the Modern Slavery and Organised Immigration Crime programme.
“That’s now just Organised Immigration Crime. So that like the modern slavery aspect has been completely dropped.”
The economic cost is also vast – Wallis said modern slavery costs the UK economy £60billion per year, about two per cent of GDP.
In just under a decade, the UK has gone from having a real “determination” to uncover the scale of the issue, to half-heartedly wanting to acknowledge it, Wallis concluded.
