A young Chongqing girl tricked into coming to Shanghai to work as a prostitute has helped police smash an online prostitution ring.

Pudong New Area police said they apprehended 12 suspects during two raids in July and August.

In cooperation with their counterparts in Chongqing, city police seized the final chief suspect on October 2.

The suspects allegedly abducted young girls from other parts of the country, and then compelled them to work as prostitutes.

They solicited customers through advertisements on the Internet, said Tang Junwei of Pudong New Area Public Security Bureau.

He revealed a police station in Pudong had made contact with a girl from Chonqing who was younger than 16 at the end of July.

The girl's parents told police how the girl had suffered after she was cheated into coming to the city.

The girl, whom Tang identified as Xiao Xing, reportedly said that she met a man through the Internet, who later introduced her to another man in downtown Chongqing named "Brother Hong."

This man convinced the girl that he had opened a restaurant in Shanghai and was in need of waitress. He promised her a monthly pay of 3,000 yuan (US$390).

"I came to the city with the two men without letting my family know anything about the matter," the girl told police. "However, they took me to a highrise building where a woman aged about 30 assigned me the job: to work as a prostitute.

"There were several other girls like me living in the apartment. A few men were sitting at the computers all day long."

Xiao said she pretended to be obedient and gained the woman's trust. "One day she asked me to serve a customer in another residential area. The moment I went out of the apartment, I hailed a taxi and called my parents."

Based on the girl's information, Pudong police raided the apartment on Laoshan Road on July 31, seizing three suspects and confiscating two computers.

Four days later police raided two other buildings in the same area, catching nine more suspects of the ring and seizing five computers.

(Shanghai Daily November 23, 2007)