New Details Surrounding Human Trafficking Arrest Of Edmond Man

There are new details surrounding the arrest of a metro man accused of human trafficking and caught with a suspected accomplice in North Carolina. 

Thursday, August 14th 2014, 11:06 pm

By: News 9


There are new details surrounding the arrest of a metro man accused of human trafficking and caught with a suspected accomplice in North Carolina.

There's really not a lot that can be found in Oklahoma about Jeremy Moots. He's 22 and graduated from Edmond Memorial High School. His record is pretty clean here, but elsewhere, he is accused of a horrific crime.

Police in North Carolina say Moots, along with another man, kidnapped two 15 and 16-year-old sisters from North Dakota and forced them to work. The two girls left home thinking they were going to make money selling magazines door to door. Instead, they were paid about $20 for eight hours of work and say Moots and his partner wouldn't let them leave.

“Basically, they were cut off from communications, and they made requests to contact their parents and made requests for bus tickets home, which were denied,” Detective Thomas Tilmon with the Wilmington Police Department said.

8/13/2014 Related Story: Edmond Man Arrested In NC For Kidnapping Sisters

Investigators are calling this a trafficking scheme involving more than just these two girls, teens who thought they were selling magazines for a little extra money but were put up in hotels and forced to stay and work for just about nothing. The teens say they were moved around a lot to avoid police.

“Part of our operation was to go to each individual hotel room that the company had rented and make sure there were no other juveniles there,” said Tilman. “I can tell you that there were two other 18-year-old men. They were adults, but they had also made the same claim that they wanted to go home.”

News 9 called the company Moots lists he works for, Midwest Circulation, LLC. We also checked out the Missouri-based company with the Better Business Bureau, and, just in Missouri alone, it has 131 complaints within the past three years. 

Moots has appeared in court and told a judge he's not guilty, but prosecutors say he was a manager of the company and definitely had control of the teen girls.

Moots was charged with human trafficking, involuntary servitude, second degree kidnapping and contributing to the delinquency and neglect of a juvenile. 

As for the girls, their parents were notified and took them home.

 

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