Police in Helsinki have uncovered an extensive prostitution ring that has been operating in the Finnish capital and other parts of Southern Finland since the autumn of 2000. The group has had the use of dozens of apartments in different parts of Helsinki. According to police estimates, hundreds of women could have been involved in the operation.

   

The Internet has also been employed in the business: pictures of the women and their contact information were published on the web page, and customers used a message board to rate the performances of the individual women.

Police are now

holding five people on remand, who are expected to face charges of at least procurement and blackmail.

   

The operation has been quite a professional one: Estonian and Russian women arriving in Finland had been assigned apartments, their transportation was taken care of, and advertisements of their services were taken out in newspapers and on the Internet. They were also given mobile telephones, and above all, their earnings were collected by the gang's leaders.

   

The business was coordinated by a "telephone operator" who would take customers' calls and refer each customer to a woman that was available at a given time.

Large amounts of money

were involved. According to one operator, the whole organisation made FIM 700,000 during three months last autumn.

   

However, it is likely that the total amount of money involved was actually much higher. One woman says that she took in nearly FIM 100,000 during a single week before Christmas. One woman was able to service up to 15 men a day.

   

Demand was also high. The police were able to monitor the mobile phone of one woman whose number was advertised in a newspaper. On an ordinary work day her phone rang 100 times during five hours - or about once every three minutes.

   

Prostitution took place in between five and seven apartments at any one time. Some of them housed several women. In one case the City of Helsinki inadvertently arranged an apartment for a Russian pimp, and even paid his rent on his behalf. The man used it for purposes of prostitution, and charged the women a high rent.

   

The pimps would also send women to different parts of the city, depending on the fluctuations of demand.

The activities also involved more serious crimes

than mere procurement for prostitution. Police say that at least some of the women were coerced into prostitution.

   

Most of their earnings went to the pimps, and sometimes blackmail was involved. Other types of coercion were also used, and the pimps kept close tabs on what the women did and how they spent their money.

   

The operation also involved an arbitrary system of heavy "fines", which could be imposed on the women for a number of reasons. In one case one of the women was left with only ten euros a day to live on.

   

Police are investigating five suspected cases of aggravated blackmail, and they are sure that the real number was much higher. One problem is that many of the women are afraid to inform on the pimps.

   

There have also been reports that one of the women would have been killed, but no direct evidence of this has been found.

   

The suspected head of the ring is in Estonia, and he has not been caught yet.

Police hope that more women who have

been blackmailed by the group would come forward. Under Finnish law prostitution itself is not a crime, but procurement is.