She and her mother were near destitute after her father had left home and she believed the handsome stranger when he offered her a job as a waitress at a coastal resort in Montenegro. Instead, she was taken to the Serbian town of Novi Sad, where she was drugged, beaten and repeatedly raped. After a couple of weeks of relentless abuse, stupefied by drink and drugs, she was taken to northern Montenegro, where she was sold as a sex slave.
It is big business for the gangsters who kidnap the women off the streets of impoverished towns in eastern Europe and the Balkans, or lure them with false promises of work, then beat them into becoming unpaid prostitutes.
Many are taken across the Adriatic to Italy, from where they are transported to the brothels of north-western Europe, including Britain.
Some are increasingly being held as captives in brothels used by the army of foreign aid workers now working across the region. Elena was luckier than most. After three years of being sold from one owner to another, police raided the bar where she was imprisoned this summer and she grabbed her chance to escape. She was taken to a secret shelter for victims of trafficking on the outskirts of Podgorica in Montenegro.
Two men were arrested in the bar, including a policeman, Vladan Bakic, who is awaiting trial. This weekend, Elena is on her way back home to Moldova, after spending several weeks at a high-security shelter run by the International Organisation for Migration. Here the lucky few who either escape from their captors or are rescued in police raids can find counselling, medical care and help to return home.
Even then, the women often face hostility from their own families, as they are forever afterwards regarded as soiled.Most of the victims of the trade in humans have been from Moldova, Romania and other countries outside Montenegro but now an increasing number are from within the tiny mountain republic which, with Serbia, makes up what remains of federal Yugoslavia.
"This is because standards of living have become worse and worse here and all criminal trades flourish in such an atmosphere," says Zana Pevicevic, who runs the IOM's operation in Podgorica. Cuddly toys and pop star posters testify to the youth of the victims at the shelter.It is dangerous work for Zana and her two assistants who run the shelter at a modern, clean and well-equipped house guarded by security cameras and with a fast-response alarm system linked to the local police. Attitudes to the human trafficking are beginning to change in Montenegro. There are signs that police raids have forced the criminal gangs behind the trade to change their main route - south through Serbia, Montenegro and Albania - to a more northerly path. The misery will not be ended, it will only be relocated.