Promising sun, sea, sand and more, Pattaya beach resort in Thailand lures eight million foreign tourists annually. However, behind the glitter lurks broken dreams, ethereal ecstasy and, often, tragedy. And behind every bargirl’s smile and every foreigner’s beer glass lurks a story: happy, touching, heart-wrenching. The author interviews bargirls, mamasans and customers, who reveal true stories of sex scams, doomed relationships and tragic suicides. The author’s investigation takes him to the capital, Bangkok, as well as to an Isaan village in northeastern Thailand, and further afield to Saigon in Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. He returns to Pattaya with a warning: You enter the manipulative world of the Pattaya bargirls at your own risk!

A side effect of Vietnam's stratospheric economic growth has been a burgeoning erotic industry catering to locals and tourists. In his fifth Undercover title and the eighth in the Undercover series, author Ewe Paik Leong investigates the gritty underbelly of Saigon. He chats with bargirls in Bui Vien Street, navigates dark alleys in Little Japan, slurps coffee in ‘hugging cafés' and swigs whiskey in nightclubs with mamasans, hustlers and goons. Hair-raising stories of sexual exploitation, ruthless betrayals and daring scams emerge. From Saigon, Ewe travels to Phuket in Thailand, where he explores Patong's Walking Street, before returning to his hometown of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to unearth nuggets on male webcam models, women go-getters and Hong Kong-style cathouses.

In George Town, the capital of Penang, the Pearl of the Orient and a Malaysian island hugely popular with domestic and international tourists, trishaws ply the streets ferrying tourists between colonial buildings, temples, food spots and bars. The more enterprising trishaw drivers offer sightseeing with sex, sometimes with unexpected results. Through candid interviews with sources in the sex industry, as well as Penang’s trishaw riders, the author discovers shocking scams, pitiful repentances and happy-ending massages that don’t end happy. Penang Undercover also looks beyond Penang to the neon lights of neighbouring Hatyai and Bangkok in Thailand to expose the shenanigans of mamasans, bargirls, dream-makers and liars. Finally, the author unearths a few hidden nuggets from his hometown of Kuala Lumpur and the subject of his fi rst two books in the Undercover series. Typical of his style, this book is written with wit and candour.

An in-depth portrait of Thailand’s billion-dollar sex industry Thailand is known internationally as a popular sex tourism destination. Yet, despite its size and reputation, remarkably little research has focused on the country’s sex industry over the past two decades. Based on original ethnographic data and other sources, Sex Tourism in Thailand is an expansive yet nuanced study of diverse sex markets and their moral economies. Ronald Weitzer shows that although some of the central pillars of Thailand’s sex industry remain unaltered over the past four decades, in other respects there has been a profound transformation. In the sector oriented toward foreign visitors, the number of sex businesses and independent operators has grown numerically and geographically; customers are increasingly diverse in race and nationality; paid sexual encounters are no longer confined to young Thai women and older white men; transgender women comprise a significant share of the workforce; and technological advances give participants more autonomy than ever before. Sex Tourism in Thailand explores these developments in conjunction with related structural and experiential dimensions in an illuminating account of sexual commerce in Southeast Asia.

An original-concept THRILLER SERIES The original trilogy of stories taking you on an emotional roller coaster ride from the pen of a former undercover cop and inspired by his bestselling true crime memoir. Join undercover cop Steve Regan in three stories as he infiltrates organized crime gangs where one mistake could cost him his life. Book 1 – Who The F*ck Am I? Regan infiltrates a Miami-based cocaine cartel linked to the Mob, but is everyone who they say they are? Book 2 - Dilemma Regan acts as bait with $50,000 drug-buy money in Thailand. Book 3 – Rivers of Blood Regan poses as a British hitman in Australia leading to the discovery of a white supremacist plot to overthrow the government of the United Kingdom. If you're a fan of fast-paced thrillers, you'll love this unique, compelling, and gripping new series that has it all: fear, crime, suspense, violence, sex, and romance. Scroll up and order all three of the original books in the series in one box set. The Secret is now also available as the prequel to the series so you can read about Regan’s first thrilling undercover adventure.

Cold-blooded Thai bargirls, naïve tourists and sordid scams – it was all in a night's work for Pattaya bar manager Simon Los. Pouring their hearts out at the bar are a tourist who reclaims his masculinity with the help of a ladyboy, a retired financier who invests thousands in a business with a woman he meets on the streets of Pattaya, a desperate Irishman who breaks the law in his pursuit of love, a high-net-worth visitor who is traded between bargirls, and many others whose heart strings are pulled to the point of breaking. For years, British expat Simon Los worked the bars of Pattaya. Befriending Thai staff as well as western and local customers, he was privy to the dating despair – and occasional joy – of countless couples. That bargirls would go to such lengths to deceive their farang boyfriends, out of poverty or greed, was not unexpected, but Simon was also surprised to see some of his customers find true love in the Land of Smiles.

What can we learn from the tragedy of these exploited young people? In Thailand, a thriving sex industry makes its money exploiting the young. Some children are coerced into prostitution and some have been sold into sexual slavery by their own families, but just as tragically there is no shortage of young girls (and boys) willing to work as prostitutes. Child Prostitution in Thailand: Listening to Rahab searches for the reasons why. This uniquely insightful book looks into the lives--and even more importantly, listens to the words--of ten Thai prostitutes. Child Prostitution in Thailand is about what we can learn from them--who they are, what they go through, and why. In their own words, the young prostitutes you'll meet in this book Thailand discuss what brought them into this life. Some have come from a tragic home situation, but not all are impoverished, orphaned, or abused. Nevertheless, they have entered into a dangerous and degrading lifestyle that often leads to violence, sickness, and early death. Of these ten prostitutes, one has already passed away and four more are dying with AIDS. This remarkable volume will help you to understand: how Thailand's child prostitution industry developed the impact upon girls and young women of Thailand's evolution from an agriculturally based economy to an industrial one changing forms of child prostitution who the customers are the role of tourism and its impact on child prostitution in Thailand how poverty, poor education, a sexually focused mass media, lack of religious emphasis, disability, and the lack of a clear policy on child prostitution help the sex industry to thrive This book also explores the details of child prostitution in Thailand--for instance, in open-air “restaurants” and “pubs” in Chiang Mai, your young waitress may double as a sex worker--and her provocative “uniform” represents a dress code enforced by the establishment’s owner. A “café” is another kind of sex service disguised as (and functioning as) a bar/restaurant. Here, young girls working ten- and eleven-hour shifts in short skirts must wear price tags pinned to their shirts and may have to service five to ten clients per night. The head of the U.S. State Department's office for international women’s issues estimates that traffickers bring 50,000 women and children into the United States illegally each year. The lessons Listening to Rahab teaches can help us to better understand the situation here at home as well as overseas. A helpful appendix assessing incidents of child prostitution around the globe bring the information even more clearly into focus.

In this follow-up to his chart-topping "Bali Raw", Malcolm Scott strips off the island’s sunny veneer to reveal its dark and dirty underbelly, taking the reader where no tourist guide ever will. Take a walk through the night streets of Kuta Beach to meet its wild and willing hookers, its dolled-up trannies and desperate college girls, and discover first hand all the sexy and sleazy secrets that the island hides by day. Creep through grimy alleyways awash with drugs and thugs and corrupt cops, and hang out in seedy bars full of cheap booze, rowdy pimps and bloody fist fights. Sneak a peek into the private lives of shifty locals and wide-eyed Australian tourists, and enjoy a voyeur’s view of the deceit, drama and everything else the island is afraid to show us. In yet another steamy exposé of Bali and its sins and secrets, Bali Undercover suggests why the island may no longer be paradise, but a paradise lost.

Bob Hamer is a 26-year veteran of the FBI. In undercover operations Hamer posed as everything from a drug dealer to an aging pedophile. His last undercover assignment-and his hardest-was infiltrating NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Now, looking back on a career rich in the kind of action that makes for great cinema, Bob tells us of the challenges he endured and overcame as he stared the dark side of humanity in the face-and never blinked. It is rare for an agent to serve undercover long-term, but he made a career out of a job that can completely consume and destroy a man. Remarkably, through all of this Bob found a way to remain true to his faith, and always put his family before his work.

The daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, along with numerous scandals involving unsafe facilities and well established scams, has led to frequent predictions that Thailand's multi-billion dollar tourist industry will self-destruct. Instead tourist numbers more than doubled in the decade to 2014. The world might not have come to the hometowns of the many visitors fascinated by Thailand, but it certainly came to the Land of Smiles. While the Thai media is heavily censored, and bad news stories about tourists suppressed, nonetheless there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that something has gone seriously awry with the nation's tourist industry. In 2014, just as in the years preceding it, there were train, bus, ferry, speedboat, motorbike and car accidents, murders, knifings, unexplained deaths, numerous suicides, diving accidents, robberies gone wrong, anonymous bodies washing up on the shores and a string of alcohol and drug related incidents. Thailand had a dying king and serious succession problems, weak democratic institutions, an economy slipping into recession, faced issues of corruption across many of its key services and was host to international crime syndicates, awash with despised foreigners and drifting perilously towards civil war. Tourists choose one destination over another for a number of reasons, most of which Thailand scores highly on. But on the core issue of tourist safety, Thailand scores very badly indeed.