Maria, a 38-year-old Venezuelan woman, arrived in Tirana in November 2024. Arrested five days later along with other women accused of prostitution, she spent months in detention in Albania, where the dramatic increase in tourism has been accompanied by an increase in cases of human trafficking and prostitution.

"Albanian women have long been victims of trafficking, but today we are facing a different situation: an international crime whose victims are women from Africa, Asia, Latin America... brought to Albania in transit or for a short stay, forced into prostitution," explains Commissioner Geranda Gjeta, from the Department for Combating Human Trafficking in Tirana.

On Wednesday, October 1, 54 women from Latin America were picked up during an operation led by Europol in Albania, Croatia, and Colombia; and seventeen people were arrested in Albania and Colombia, including the alleged leader of the network.

Mainly composed of Colombians, the network "recruited and transported vulnerable women from Colombia to Europe. Once under the network's control, the victims were subjected to sexual exploitation in several European countries, including Albania and Croatia," Europol explained.

The criminals oversaw everything "from recruitment to collecting money, often subjecting victims to psychological and physical violence, as well as threats against their loved ones in Colombia."

- "Hell" -

According to Albanian police investigations, victims enter the country on tourist or work visas, via temporary employment agencies, and often with false documents that allow them to travel to other European countries after a few months. They generally know they are coming to prostitute themselves, lured by promises of easy money.

"I was promised paradise but I found hell," Maria, whose first name has been changed for security reasons like all the women mentioned, told AFP in an apartment rented by Vatra, an Albanian association that helps victims.

Caught red-handed in prostitution in Elbasan, an industrial city in the center of the country, in an apartment rented online where she and other women were to receive clients, Maria spent seven months in pre-trial detention in Tirana.

Exhausted, she says she heard about Albania from "friends" who boasted about the well-paid work, without hiding the fact that it was prostitution. "But we didn't know it was illegal, otherwise we wouldn't have come here."

Police found erotic photos, dating apps, and messages from foreign numbers, including those in Peru and Lithuania, on his phone. The investigation is still ongoing to try to trace these numbers.

The police also found Carina's number, stored on the phones of two other women arrested with Maria. According to one of them, who will be called Ana, it was the number of the woman who brought her from Colombia.

Carina created a WhatsApp group called "Chicas"—"girls" in Spanish. It included a list of sexual services and schedules. She also managed client contacts, distributed passes, and found apartments in exchange for 50% of the profits. This was to reimburse the women in the group for travel expenses to Albania, she explained.

- Threats -

These women are lured by "criminals who offer them a new perspective" and promise quick money, explains Commissioner Geranda Gjeta.

Attracted by criminal groups "who have considerable logistical and financial capacity," once in Europe, "they fall prey to scams and threats from these criminals who send them videos of their families or death threats," says the commissioner.

"There is less visible violence than before," says Nenad Nača, team leader specializing in human trafficking at Europol. "Criminals have understood that the human beings they traffic—who for them are not human beings, just commodities—lose their value if they are injured, and risk attracting attention. So they manipulate, they use different coercion techniques, psychological violence or 'educational violence': they film someone being beaten and show the video to others, letting them know that this is what will happen to them if they disobey."

Thus threatened, when they are arrested, "they prefer to assume full responsibility for their actions," explains Brikena Puka, the head of the Vatra center, who has observed for several months "an increase in the number of foreign victims of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation."

Upon their release from prison, Vatra allowed Maria and Ana to stay in a secure apartment while they retrieved their passports, which were still in the hands of the police, and left Albania.

It is from this apartment that Ana, 32, originally from the Dominican Republic, tells her story to AFP.

This mother of two worked in a bar in Barcelona, but her earnings weren't enough to cover the rent, feed her children, and send money home to her parents. Spotted by a network, she took a job as an escort in Albania—where she would have to "give half of the money she earned to the person who would manage her contacts with clients."

"We do prostitution out of need," Ana explains. "We see it as something quick and easy. But it's not true. Not only do we allow ourselves to be mistreated, but we're also forced to give 50% of what we earn from our bodies to our pimps," she adds, struggling to hold back tears.

- Decentralized crime -

Closed to the world for decades, Albania was plunged into a crisis in the 1990s that facilitated the emergence of a mafia that became one of the most powerful in Europe, specializing in human trafficking and heroin trafficking, recalls Fabrice Rizzoli, a specialist in organized crime.

More than 30 years later, Albania, which has become a mass tourist destination, is seeing prostitution, which is illegal in the country, take root on its territory - as in all countries where the number of tourists is increasing, explains Mr. Rizzoli, taking as an example the influx of prostitutes during major world sporting events.

Between 2024 and early 2025, authorities arrested 15 foreigners and 10 Albanians as part of investigations into these criminal networks, according to data compiled by the NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). Around 90 women, mostly foreigners, were prosecuted.

During the first six months of 2025, Albanian police opened 108 investigations, conducting large-scale operations in massage parlors, bars, and hotels, according to data collected by AFP. At least 37 foreign nationals suspected of trafficking-related crimes and around ten potential victims of sexual exploitation were identified.

"It has become a transnational challenge," adds Commissioner Gjeta, whose colleagues in charge of cybercrime are investigating several websites hosted abroad that allow prostitution clients to pay - almost - without any trace, and criminals to launder part of the proceeds.

"We're seeing cooperation between groups—we're no longer in a national mafia type; criminal networks operate in a more decentralized manner—they're cells that cooperate with each other across countries or continents—and are very mobile, so very difficult to track," adds Nenad Nača. "By the time an investigation is launched, they've sometimes already moved to another country—so cooperation is essential."