Prostitutes in Pattaya, police locate seven foreigners selling illegal services
MONTAGE: Naew Na
Immigration officials have done the impossible – they’ve found something police and immigration have often claimed in the past ‘does not exist’.
Prostitution in Pattaya.
Seven foreigners – shock, horror – were arrested on Tuesday night this week prostituting themselves to locals and tourists in the town’s tourist hotspots.
Naew Na reports that “this illegal activity was damaging Pattaya and Thailand’s image”.
A team led by Chonburi immigration Pol Maj Jinda Khaekpanya also arrested a 28 year old woman from Uganda and charged her with prostituting herself on the street. She will be deported. No local girls were discovered in the mini-crackdown selling illegal services.
Six others, four from Egypt and two from Uzbekistan, have had their particulars taken down and were warned that “selling themselves again would result in trouble”.
Every six months or so Pattaya police and officials have their staged walk, with media in tow, doing an informal stroll down Walking Street then proudly proclaiming to the media that there is “no evidence of prostitution”. The government has been trying to upgrade Pattaya’s reputation and rebranding Sin City as a “family-oriented world class location”.
Whilst the town’s officials and police have been incapable of finding any prositution in Pattaya (up to now), the World Health Organisation, and other NGOs, have written several reports over the years maintaining there are approximately 30,000 prostitutes working in the Greater Pattaya area.
