[color=#006600][/color] Benin City, Nigeria, is a human-trafficking hub, and a good place to observe how the criminal operation works. After long negotiations, our team manages to speak to a recruiter, whose job it is to find girls. The recruiter explains that they either approach girls directly or through their families offering fake jobs abroad in a supermarket, or as a cleaner. However, not everyone is tricked. Many women approach the recruiters themselves, often in full knowledge that they will be working as a prostitute in Europe. Some parents, also aware of this, approach recruiters on behalf of their children. Destiny, who was 19 when she was trafficked to Spain three years ago, told me she knew sex would be involved but had never imagined she would be turned into a sex slave. "If you live in Benin, there are many girls who came back from [Spain] with lots of money. They told us they had to have sex sometimes," she says. "We are not stupid but I did not know I would be beaten and raped and have to have sex every night of the week." NGOs in Benin City say many of the recruiters now look outside the major cities in order to find girls who have not heard their warnings about the reality of life for trafficked women, or the stories of those like Destiny who have returned and are now alerting others to the dangers. Once recruited, the girls are then taken to Lagos or to northern Nigeria where they are picked up by men known as "coyotes" or "trolleys". The journey to Europe is perilous. Wire taps reveal how coyotes transporting women were stopped by armed groups in the deserts of Niger or southern Libya demanding thousands of euros for them to pass. "One phone call from a coyote to SEC showed how a coyote was saying, 'I have a gun on my head and they want money,'" says Cortes. A woman who was herself trafficked tells me about other horrors. "The journey took weeks," says Sarah, who arrived in Spain in 2013 at the age of 21. "One of the girls kept asking for water. The men did not like it so they threw her out in the desert in Libya. They left her and we continued the journey. They told the boss on the phone that she was killed by terrorists. We were not human beings. We were animals." Once girls are trafficked across the desert, they are then taken to "keepers", who often rape them before they cross to Europe. "When we got to Libya they put us in a house," says Sarah. "This is when I knew we would not be working in a supermarket. One man was taking care of us. He would have sex with us, rape us. Then I became pregnant." Women who insist they will not work as prostitutes are tied up in a position called "the crocodile". Their hands tied to their feet, they are left for days with no food or water. Some are left to die as an example to others. Keepers often get the women pregnant prior to making the crossing to Spain. With a child or pregnant, they stand a better chance of not being deported, and the men can use access to the child as a form of blackmail to keep the women under control. Two years ago, at a time when the coyotes reported Libya had become too dangerous, recorded phone calls show that the girls were taken instead to Greece, via Yemen, Iran and Turkey. And today, as the Mediterranean becomes more difficult to cross - and the authorities try harder to detect traffickers - the SEC has begun to use airports in the UK more frequently. "This is a more expensive option for the group," Cortes tells me. "They use forged documents and passports from Nigeria to fly into places like Gatwick. The language is also easier for them. These documents are expensive though and need co-operation of people working in the government to get."