Nguyen Thi Ngoc Anh was recruited by another unidentified woman to go abroad as a prostitute last November. She invited another woman in Hanoi to go with her, saying they would work as card dealers at a casino for VND15 million ($645) a month.

In fact, Anh was tricking the other woman into prostitution, media reports said.

The three women went from the northern province of Thai Nguyen to Myanmar on November 5 last year. In January, Anh and the woman who first recruited her returned to Vietnam to look for another woman to be tricked into prostitution in Myanmar, but they were caught by the police and placed under investigation.

However, Anh managed to escape this July and has been on the run since.

In recent years, Vietnamese workers, mainly women, have been visiting Southeast Asian countries and staying on to work illegally, some of them as sex workers. Many have been caught, detained and deported.