This is the first time I have ever heard of anything like this in Korea:

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.  [Korea Herald via reader tip]

Read the rest but apparently this southeast Asian lady duo are hitting up the major shopping districts in Seoul looking for allegedly young females to abduct for human trafficking.  I find this hard to believe, but has anyone seen any young southeast Asian women in Seoul asking questions like this?