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Vietnamese madam cuffed after advertising girls on Facebook

Art museum nudies NO! But prostitutes, sure

Police in Vietnam have swooped on a prostitution ring after spotting one enterprising lady-of-the-night using Facebook to advertise her girls’ wares to potential punters.

Cops in the capital Hanoi cuffed 20-year-old Do Thi Huyen, of Truong Dinh ward in the city's Hai Ba Trung district as she and a colleague were escorting two gents to a nearby hotel, according to local news site Tienphong (in Vietnamese, English version available on TechInAsia).

Huyen’s alleged money-making scheme was simple. She is said to have posted pictures of her business associates on the Facebook page and, when a user clicked on the one he fancied, she would let him know the price.

Huyen apparently confessed to charging around VND4 million (£125) for a session with one of her "associates", nabbing VND1m (£31) of that as a fee for her brokerage services. Punters apparently had to take the girls to a "minimum" of a 3-star hotel to enjoy their bout of horizontal jogging.

The Hanoi cops had apparently been monitoring Huyen’s e-bonk business dealings since the beginning of the month but only caught up with her this week. The offending Facebook pages have since been closed down.

According to Tienphong, Vietnamese law makes it difficult to start criminal proceedings against girls advertising their nocturnal wares on Facebook, unless there’s clear evidence of organised brokerage activity (pimping) taking place.

In other cases, the penalties are a relatively lenient VND 100,000 (£3) to VND 300,000 (£9).

As pointed out by TechInAsia, Facebook itself has a pretty unequivocal policy regarding nudity on its pages, designed presumably to discourage just this kind of activity:

Our policy prohibits photos of actual nude people, not paintings or sculptures. We recognise that this policy might in some cases result in the removal of artistic works; however, it is designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users.

Screenshots of the now-deleted page seen by El Reg appear to contravene the above policy, suggesting that Zuck and co. need to sharpen their filth filters a bit.

However, they were working just fine when the social networking giant took the venerable New York Academy of Art to task back in 2011, after it posted a nudey drawing on its official Facebook page. ®

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