Another defendant, who is a former winner of the Miss Shining Beauty contest, was granted bail because of her pregnancy. The ring involved several beauty queens, models, students and so-called "hot girls", the latter expression used to describe young women whose beauty is highly regarded on the internet.
Police said the defendants had also organised "sex tours" for the girls to work in other countries. The police recently busted many prostitution rings that were exclusively serving businesspeople, tourists, and the affluent, he told a meeting on Monday. Nguyen Van Minh, deputy director of the Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, said it was a tough task to monitor all the licensed services that have mushroomed in recent years.
The department regularly cracked down on suspected businesses but the results remained modest because the operators were getting smarter and there was a shortage of manpower, he said. In many cases, people convicted of prostitution-related offences used other people's names to register for licences to continue their illegal businesses, he added.
The city is also witnessing a rise in the number of methamphetamine addicts, according to a report by the Department of Public Security. Meth accounted for a third of the total quantity of addictive drugs confiscated this year, and four times that of heroin, which used to be the most popular drug, the report said. Health, public security and customs authorities complained about the problems faced in managing medicines used in making meth.
Last year pharmaceutical companies in the city had used more than seven tonnes of controlled addictive substances, raising concerns, Minh said. The city is also a transit point for illegal drug trafficking, with five cases of transnational transportation discovered this year.
