Three men are facing sex trafficking charges after authorities say they lured young gay Hungarian men to South Florida and forced them into prostitution.
Gabor Acs, 31, Viktor Berki, 28, and Andras Janos Vass, 24, are facing charges including human trafficking, racketeering and deriving support from prostitution, the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office said Friday.
The investigation dates back to October 2013, when Homeland Security received a tip that three men in Miami Beach were possible victims of human trafficking.
Prosecutors said the men, ages 20-22, were lured to the United States with the promise of quick, easy and legal cash, and they were brought to New York before arriving in Miami.
Once in Miami, the men engaged in prostitution or performed sex acts in front of a webcam for 18-20 hours a day, prosecutors said. All the payments went to Acs, Berki and Vass.
The victims told investigators that the suspects "used various techniques to keep them enslaved, including isolating them from others, withholding their travel and identification documents, and using financial manipulation to keep them in constant debt," the State Attorney's Office said in a statement.
The suspects rarely let their victims leave their shared apartment and they were told it was because they could not speak English and they were not familiar with the area, authorities said.
Acs, Berki and Vass threatened and psychologically intimidated the men and took their identification documents and locked them in a safe, authorities said. The victims also experienced levels of violence from the suspects.
Neighbors said they saw several luxury cars stop at the suburban home. At one point, they allegedly had a sign on the front door advertising $5 car washes, which is illegal in a residential neighborhood. Police said the car wash was a front for having so many cars pull into the house.
"The overall attractiveness of our South Florida area is equally attractive to sex traffickers," State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a statement. "These individuals may have come from a different country to exploit the vulnerable but they used the same basic trafficker tools of fear and intimidation to make their profits."
Two of the suspects, Berki and Vass, were arrested in New York. Acs was arrested in Miami and was being held at Krome Detention Center Friday, officials said.
