Prostitution in Upper Austria

The sex trade is a “traveling circus”

Police in Wels and Linz recently succeeded in striking a blow against traffickers in girls. A Hungarian quartet is said to have drugged the women and forced them into prostitution throughout Austria, but mainly in Linz and Wels. And yet: most of the business with lust is legal.

Their addiction made a dozen 18 to 30-year-old Hungarian women submissive, they did not have to be beaten or locked up. "Supplying them with drugs was enough to keep them", says a human trafficking investigator from the Upper Austrian State Criminal Police Office. Investigators had been observing the Hungarians who "offered" the women, some of whom had been trafficked, in Linz and Wels for six months before they struck. Two women and a minder were caught and three men behind the scenes were arrested in Hungary.