A woman was sold to a Glasgow man after being trafficked into Scotland.
Adriana Adiova was promised a job and designer clothes when she was approached by another woman in her native Slovakia, instead she found herself enslaved by human traffickers.
She left her home after being promised work: "We were supposed to work on a potato farm and were told there would be money and designer clothes for us. But when we arrived we realised it was a fake offer and there was no job. Within two weeks I had no money and no work.
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"We stayed in Glasgow, although I thought it was London. The woman who had arranged for us to come said she had another job', which was a wedding."
"I was sold to a Pakistani man in Glasgow and we flew to Dublin to marry. He bought me two dresses for my wedding, one red and one white."
Despite Adriana's experience and that of other victims, there have been no human trafficking convictions in Scotland in the last three years.
The Crown Office blames the complexity of cases and court backlogs caused by covid, but former anti-slavery commissioner Dame Sara Thornton has called on society to be "super-vigilant".
She said: "I know Police Scotland are highly engaged with a very good team and it is just a matter of those cases coming through the system.
"Service industries such as cleaning, catering and contracted-out services are areas where we need to be super-vigilant.
"One challenge is that there isn't a group of people who are offenders and a group of people who are victims and they are totally separate. Victims of human trafficking can end up, as a consequence, also committing offences themselves. It requires expertise with trauma-informed practitioners to untangle that issue."
The gang behind Arianna's ordeal were brought to justice in 2019 when Vojtech Gombar, Ratislav Adam and Jana Sandorova, from Slovakia, and Anil Wagle, from Nepal, were jailed for a total of 36 years.
She was one of many women trafficked from Slovakia to be sold as brides or into prostitution. One victim was sold for £10,000 outside the Primark store in the city's Argyle Street.
She recalled: "I did not love my husband and I did not even know him. I was forced to get married. What else could I have done without money? I was told I must get married and I was afraid."
Dame Thornton added: "A case like that took years with really painstaking, trauma-informed work by officers to gain the confidence of the victims to give evidence."
Last year, a judge dismissed their appeal before it even reached court after a case that cost £450,000 in legal aid.
The female victims faced a life of misery after being brought to Scotland from Slovakia for onward sale into sham marriages or prostitution.
The gang appealed the verdict but a judge ruled the convictions will stand.
They were caught by an international operation, code-named Synapsis, which began in 2014.
Gombar, 31, Adam, 31 and Sandorova, 28, based themselves in two flats in a tenement in Govanhill, and sold one of the women to Wagle, 38, for £10,000.
Detective Superintendent Fil Capaldi, said: "This group exploited vulnerable women using violence, threats and false promises, all for financial gain, without a thought for the suffering of these women."
Judge Lord Beckett said: "Such crimes are utterly repugnant. They involve the degradation of other humans, treating them as if they were objects or animals to be transported and sold for exploitation."
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