Tricked by Facebook and enslaved by two brothers in the Marconi industrial estate

Her exploiter's eyes were on her for 24 hours.

From the moment she woke up, she was watched so she wouldn't spend too much time with any of the men who paid to have sex with her, so she'd hand over all the money at the end of the day, so she wouldn't think of running away.

Until one day in early January her captor had a mistake and the girl was able to run until she found a National Police patrol.

On January 10, she sat down in front of two agents to tell her story: “It all started when I met a guy on Facebook…”.

From the beginning of that conversation on social networks until he stopped that police car, three years and seven months passed.

The victim, now a protected witness, was then living in his native Romania, one day he received a message from a stranger and they began to talk.

At that time she was 20 years old and he filled her head with illusions for three months.

So many that she ended up getting on a plane with the promise of a job in Spain in the family business she believed to be her boyfriend.

Arriving here, she was deceived, albeit gradually.

They explained to her that there was a problem with the job she was going to occupy and that she was going to have to work temporarily on the street.

"My sister will be with you, she does too," she assured him.

This is how he ended up on the Principal avenue of the Marconi industrial estate in Madrid, known for years as one of the epicenters of prostitution and drugs, something that has changed in recent times.

"We were surprised by the type of exploitation because now the focus is on the flats, the scene of the polygon is no longer the same as it was a few years ago," says Tomás Santamaría, group leader at the Madrid Provincial Immigration and Border Brigade.

"It is impossible to calculate how many floors are used for prostitution, it is very variable, they close one, open three...", he admits, while lamenting the difficulty of prosecuting these crimes on private properties.

The technique to attract women by cajoling is well known by specialized agents: it is called the

.

“The boy falls in love with her, he promises her a life in Spain that later is not real.

Before, they had to go to the countries of origin and pick up the girls in the discos, for example.

Now it is no longer necessary to move, they do the same through networks ”, he details.

Upon reaching the destination, threats and beatings arrive if she refuses to comply with his orders, regardless of the state in which the woman is.

"They threatened to send her family photos and screenshots to her family and reveal what she really did in Spain and this was terrifying for her," says Santamaría.

Small groups

What has also been left behind are the macro-organizations of human trafficking.

"There still are, but what we find most of all are small groups in which each member has a specific role and controls a group of women," says the police officer.

In this case, the family business was limited to these two brothers, he was 30 years old and she was 32.

While the man captured her and controlled her accounts, her sister watched and also practiced prostitution in some cases.

Her brothers kept her captive in an apartment a few meters from the road where they exploited her for 10 or 12 hours a day.

They came and went walking every day.

The police have not detected that they enslaved more women in the time that they have investigated them.

The arrest of both came at the end of this year.

In October, the woman was shackled and a month later, it was his turn, when she set foot at the airport after getting off the plane from Romania.

"He came back when he thought everything was calm here, but we had it under control and we knew that he was going back to Madrid that day," Santamaría details.

Thanks to the data provided by the victim, the investigations cornered the criminals.

“It is rare that someone denounces, in this case the victim could take advantage of a mistake.

Sometimes we have received the complaint from the users of prostitution anonymously by the complaint telephone number (900 10 50 90), it is not normal for them to want to be involved”, acknowledges the inspector.

This victim found her release by running through the streets of a polygon until she escaped from her captors.

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