Foreign female duo arouses suspicions in downtown Seoul

Stories have been circulating recently about a duo of Southeast Asian women in the crowded shopping districts of downtown Myeong-dong, suspected of acting as agents of human trafficking organizations.

"Two women, who look Southeast Asian, would come and ask their way to a specific place, usually a popular tourist spot," said Chung Jee-won, a 29-year-old woman living in Seoul.

One would hardly become suspicious based just on such requests, as Myeong-dong is one of the busiest streets in Seoul, always full of inquiring tourists, she explained.

"As they have the obvious looks of Asian tourists and stutter in clumsy Korean, people would become more obliging than they usually are," she said. "Also, women would be taken off-guard as the inquirers, too, are female."



However, after a few words, the stray tourists start to seem not so innocent, she said.

"They would list various tourist places, scattered all over Seoul and hardly appropriate for a single trip," she said. "After answering three or four such questions, I felt that they just kept throwing random questions, just to have me talk."

By the time the duo asked her to take them to a nearby bus station, Chung had already become suspicious of their intentions, so she set off to go her way.

"Then, they urgently caught my sleeve, at which I became scared," she said. "What urgent needs could two harmless tourists have, unless they had other pretexts?"

As Chung shook them off, she first felt partly guilty that she may have been unjustly harsh toward tourists, but the duo calmly started to scan the streets again, she said.

"It was a crowded Sunday evening in Myeong-dong and they could have picked anyone, should they want to ask their way," she said. "However, they only paced up and down until they found a woman who was on her own."

Chung was apparently not the only one to encounter the suspicious Southeast Asian female duo.

"These fake female tourist duos are often seen in Myeong-dong these days," said Lee Yoon-hee, a 22-year-old university student who often visits the neighborhood. "Based on my experiences and my friends` stories, I sense that there are more than just a few such groups scattered all over the shopping districts."

The duo are usually persistent in their questions, but are easily scared off when one threatens to call a policeman or points at a nearby police station, Lee said.

"Of course, we cannot know for sure what such duos may truly intend, but can only guess that the victims may not have made their way back, had they truly been kidnapped," said Chung.

"It is a highly probable theory that they are cat`s paws for human trafficking organizations, targeting at kidnapping and selling off women in their 20s."

Stories are often told of how such organizations would use elderly women or disabled people in order to disarm their potential abductees, but the foreign female duo system has relatively been unheard of, she said.

"Because of these risks, people now cannot but suspect all strangers in the streets, including the innocent one who only wished to ask their way out," said Lee Jee-hee, a female company worker living in Seoul.

No official investigation has yet been launched on this possible criminal possibility, but young women who are alone in the streets are advised not to let down their guard upon the approach of strangers, said an official of the National Police Agency.

(tellme@heraldm.com)





By Bae Hyun-jung