Sex Trafficking System From Mexico Using Teen Girls, Residential Brothels, Sophisticated Payment Reported (But We're Doubtful)

Underground brothels in L.A?

On Monday the Los Angeles-based Catholic Online website was touting a report of a new form of sex trafficking reaching the United States from Mexico.

In this particular system, women are imported from south of the border and put to work ...

... in "Latino residential brothels" that target Latino-immigrant customers.

According to an MSNBC report on the houses of ill repute, the operators are slicker than ever.

Sometimes business cards offering "tacos" and "burritos" are handed out to potential customers.

Operators allegedly use "coded" advertising in ethnic media and eschew straight-cash payments in an attempt to thwart the law:

Within the brothel, usually a typical house or apartment, a unique accounting strategy uses tokens such as poker chips and marbles, which are purchased by the "johns" and given as proof of purchase to the women and girls to keep track of how many men have visited them. A token, which costs $30 in the majority of cases, buys 15 minutes of sex in a sparse bedroom. According to the Polaris Project, an organization that operates a national hotline and offers services for victims of all types of human trafficking,one victim reported that she was forced to have sex with 55 men in one day.

The girls, allegedly as young as 13, are recruited with promises of domestic work in the U.S., according to MSNBC.

Proof of all this? Not much.

You'd think if people were doing this in America, we'd hear a lot about it in L.A. But not a peep. Law enforcers say one of the problems is that the brothels move on from house to house and circulate the girls around in order keep ahead of the cops.

If any of you have seen any "taco" business cards, drop us a line.