11 spas busted, 26 women rescued, all of them new arrivals from China who don't speak English. Owners of these criminal enterprises are all Chinese or Chinese American.
police set in motion a vast prostitution and money-laundering investigation, tying massage parlors and spas in Seattle to a sophisticated criminal network that brings Chinese women into the U.S. through hubs in California and New York and funnels millions of dollars back to China, said Sgt. Tom Umporowicz of the Seattle Police Department’s Vice & High Risk Victims Section.
Twenty-six Chinese women, many of them new arrivals who spoke little or no English, were removed from the parlors, where they lived and worked in squalid, dingy conditions.
I am continually surprised at the amount of human trafficking in Western Washington and the left coast in general (Victoria, BC, down to Sandy Eggo). It seems like there is a similar bust (this one is larger than typical) every six months.
I don't know how it compares, but there's been a huge proliferation of these spas in small town U.S.A. Here in central Arkansas, we've seen a few dozen open up in the last two decades (where there were really none...maybe one...before).