Promises of a better life in many social media posts are often a trap for marginalised communities such as the Roma

In the village of Bag, north-east of Budapest, the houses along the main street are smart and well-kept. Tucked behind, up a slight hill, where the buildings become bare brick and the tarmac road turns into a dust track, people sit on the ground in the afternoon sun, talking and playing cards.

These are the Roma, or the Roma who remain in Hungary, where they live on society’s edge, clinging on in the outskirts of towns and villages, shunned and stigmatised as potential criminals.

Many have left, seeking a better life elsewhere in Europe, often in the UK. Poor and marginalised, they are easy pickings for traffickers who post adverts on Facebook promising a bright future for those prepared to travel.

Many have succumbed to the temptation. A lot of young people have gone to the UK to work, say the people playing cards. One man who gives his name as Kalman says his 27-year-old sister has gone to Britain, to marry a Turkish man she had never met.

An older man says many of his relatives have gone too. For a better life, he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Martin, a Roma from the village of Bag, east of Budapest, wants to move to the UK. Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain/Guardian

A woman holding a baby comes to the gate of her house. Sabrina says her sister is living in the UK after answering an advert on Facebook for an arranged marriage to an Iraqi man who wanted EU paperwork. The sister thought she’d simply have a better life. Sabrina’s husband emerges and shouts to her to come away from the gate.

London, Manchester, Sheffield, Bolton, Leeds, Bristol – these are some of the cities where people have heard they can make money. The line between economic migration and exploitation is ill-defined: some who travel are aware of the risks but prepared to take a chance, others think they are off to start a better life only to end up in modern slavery.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Agnes De Coll of Hungarian Baptist Aid: ‘It usually starts with some kind of promise of a better life’ Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain/The Guardian

“It usually starts with some kind of promise that it is going to a better life,” says Agnes De Coll, head of anti-trafficking for Hungarian Baptist Aid, an NGO working with the country’s police. Young women in particular are vulnerable to traffickers who befriend them with promises of romance. “Most of the times they are afraid of the cities, they don’t know the language, they live in the rented apartment where they are doing the sex work and they don’t know anything better.

“It is so frightening for someone coming from a village. It is shocking. That’s why they stay, because they are so afraid. It makes them even more vulnerable, more attached to the pimp.”

Baptist Aid can get about 40 or 50 a year into shelters and help maybe another 100 more, but thousands of Hungarians are in similar positions around Europe. Jobs are advertised on Facebook, she says. One girl answered an advert for a babysitter. At the interview she was taken in a car to Slovakia and kept for two weeks until other girls arrived and then they were taken to the UK.

They were told they could choose to be a prostitute or the wife of someone from a developing country. That girl escaped, she says, but blackmail is a problem. “There is usually a money-lender in the villages where the Roma live on the edges of towns and villages and they are always blackmailing the families every day, asking for more and more.

“Sometimes they make the family work without pay to work off their debt and after a while they figure that if there is a young daughter in the family they can get rid of the debt. They threaten them with all kinds of things.”

Rachel Harper, helpline manager for the UK anti-trafficking charity Unseen, says it has picked up dozens of cases of exploitation. “Traffickers know where to find vulnerable individuals and how to target them, including online,” she says. “Cases of modern slavery, across various types of exploitation, have been reported to the Modern Slavery Helpline where the potential exploiter initially contacted the potential victim, recruited them or exerted control via social media.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria was a UK sex worker. Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain/Guardian

Ion answered an advert on Facebook promising work and housing, but he reached the UK to be told he owed his trafficker money. He was threatened with violence, the wages he earned from a factory job taken from him.

Mihai thought the advert he saw on Facebook would lead to a proper factory job, but he ended up picking vegetables for less than minimum wage, threatened with violence, even murder, kept in cramped accommodation and allowed no freedom.

Maria Szuda stands in the darkness outside her apartment in the town of Orosháza, 200km south-east of Budapest, drawing heavily on a cigarette, her face lit by the glow of her phone as she scrolls and then points at the screen – a Facebook page, post after post of adverts for work in or travel to the UK.

Facebook was where her 32-year-old daughter Ivett was recruited. She has been in jail since January when a British jury convicted her and her husband Karl Ring, 34, of controlling the prostitution of women trafficked into the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

“Ten floors of whores”, a tabloid headlined the case: a London apartment block in Chelsea where Hungarians were brought in to work as prostitutes.

The court heard they used low-cost airline Wizz Air to fly the women in before forcing them into sex work. Szuda had worked as a prostitute herself, the judge said, before marrying Ring - a former client.



Ivett Szuda may not have been an innocent abroad, despite her mother’s protestations to the contrary, but researchers investigating trafficking from Hungary to the UK say many are and that social media has a key role in recruitment. The UN and European commission both list the UK as a major destination for Hungarians trafficked into labour exploitation. Other countries, notably Germany, the Netherlands and France, have higher rates of sexual exploitation but the UK is becoming an increasingly important destination.

The European commission’s Together Against Trafficking in Human Beings document describes Hungary as “primarily a source and transit country for women and girls subjected to trafficking for sexual exploitation and for men and women for trafficking for labour exploitation”. It is not an ethnic problem – there are both Roma and non-Roma – more one of poverty, poor education and high unemployment, says Hungarian trafficking expert Viktoria Sebhelyi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest VIktoria Sebhelyi blames poverty, poor education and high unemployment. Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain/The Guardian

Curious about the role of social media in recruitment, Sebhelyi teamed up with child psychologist Dora Varga-Sabján to create a Facebook profile purporting to be that of a 16-year-old Hungarian girl. They suspected that the platform was being used by people involved in trafficking to groom vulnerable young women who did not have a strong family network.

The character they created was described as living in care and new to Facebook. They had her join some popular groups and sat back to watch what happened next. Within two weeks the profile was contacted by 116 people – 108 men and eight women, aged from 19 to 65.

People added her to other closed groups. She was put in secret makeup and haircare groups where recruitment was going on. The men tended to open with a compliment – “Hi, I like your eyes” – even though the researchers had only posted an avatar.

“I just want to make new friends. Is it okay? I don’t want anything more. I just want to understand you.”

The researchers replied politely, making clear that the “girl” was under the age of 18 and asking if that was OK. Of course, they told her. Don’t worry.

Then they asked more questions, probing for weaknesses. “Do you have a good relationship with your parents? Do you have a lot of girlfriends? How close are you?”

It didn’t take long – sometimes just a couple of chats – for the subject to turn to sex. Some men talked about sex after only two brief chats. There were naked pictures and questions about her own sex life. In the closed groups, there were leading questions.

“How did you get that look, did your parents buy it? No? Oh, your parents are dead, oh that’s interesting.”

It was clear, says Sebhelyi, that these were the same methods used in trafficking: the identification of a vulnerable target and then the grooming.

Twitter’s own rules prohibit the promotion of adult sexual content globally, including pornography, escort services and prostitution, though the existence of the #escort hashtag seems to fly in the face of this policy. Facebook forbids the publication of content that attempts to coordinate or recruit for adult sexual activities.

The challenge for anyone trying to prevent recruitment through Facebook or Twitter posts is the speed at which they appear and disappear and, as Sebhelyi notes, the ease with which victims can be drawn into private groups away from public scrutiny. The Facebook page Maria Szuda was looking for was one of the largest UK forums for Hungarians - Legnagyobb Info Oldal Nagy-Britanniában.

An array of messages advertise jobs and services, including people arranging travel to the UK. Most will be honest: spotting rogue ads is virtually impossible. But there are other less innocent sites publicly visible. One of the largest advertisers of sexual services in Hungary - red-life.net - has a Facebook listing redirecting to its website, where sex work is advertised both in Hungary and abroad, including the UK. Red-life is also on Twitter.

The Lyukó valley, on the edge of the north-eastern industrial city of Miskolc, is not a place where the government takes care of people, says Andrew Turro, a coordinator with the Roma self-government. The old mining area is filled with shacks, interspersed with a few more substantial houses. There are green hills and fruit and vegetable gardens, horses and carts, old cars and farming machinery.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Lyukó valley, where exploitation is widespread. Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain/Guardian

“People prefer to live in the UK. They have work and a decent living and it is better than Hungary because they are not targeted as much,” he says. One man says his daughters are working in the UK, but he doesn’t know what they are doing. They’re working as prostitutes, says Turro, as he tries to get the attention of a neighbour whose husband is away taking people to the UK, mostly women.

“I’ve got a lot of friends working abroad,” a younger woman says. “During the past four years a lot of people have left here. There’s very little money that people can make here.”

Many children grow up thinking they want to work abroad, but they don’t end up happy, she says. István and his daughters went to the UK with a middleman. He worked in construction, they danced in a club near Manchester and had sex with men in the rooms above. Their employers held their passports and stopped them leaving.

Prostitution is regarded as a practical route out of poverty, even if it is exploitative, says Gabor Varady, leader of the Roma minority self-government in Miskolc. “There is a certain sorrow that for family or economic reasons these girls are forced to do this. No one would want to do this, it is a last straw, it is not a pensionable job.

“But someone working as a prostitute in the UK will make as much in a month as I do in half a year. How do you tell them to stop?”





