Walking Street bar owners fed up with migrant street vendors pestering their customers have taken to filming the illegals to spur police to act.
The bar owners, who did not want to be named, contacted the media Aug. 3 to share their videos of Cambodian and Burmese peddlers employing young children to help them sell flowers. They suspected that, in most cases, the tiny kids – ages 3-5 – are not even related to the vendors.
Human traffickers often get young children and match them up with unrelated hawkers to squeeze cash out of sympathetic tourists in Pattaya. Police occasionally sweep up and deport the vendors, but the bar operators claim nothing has been done for a while.
The children pull on the heartstrings of bar customers to get them to fork over 100 baht for a rose. But the money often goes into the hands of traffickers. Those who don’t pay often will find themselves on the receiving end of an aggressive migrant’s anger, the barkeeps said.
One manager said she has seen the same woman on Walking Street for about two years, but has had several different small children with her.
