But with a difference. This time the focus was not on the plight of the victims, but on the disgrace of a national sporting hero who is alleged to have obtained entry visas for the women. Wolfgang Schwarz, the 54-year-old Austrian Olympic figure skating champion of the 1968 Games, was arrested for alleged involvement in procuring the seven women. While the case focused on Schwarz, the victims have been largely forgotten - and the causes of prostitution ignored.
The women are trapped between economic and social hopelessness in their home countries in the east, while Western legal restrictions block them from legitimate immigration and jobs.
The two factors create the breeding ground for the criminal gangs which amass astronomical profits from the trade through violence, degradation and human misery.
An estimated 6,000 prostitutes work in Vienna - but only 500 are registered with police. A large proportion of the unregistered are from eastern Europe. In 1998, the European Union estimated the number of victims of trafficking in women and girls at half a million.
A study by the Vienna-based Ludwig Boltzmann Institute showed that the phenomenon of human trafficking began soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Women were often the first victims of the new post-Communist unemployment as dismal economic circumstances and the collapse of social security in the east hit women particularly hard.
Cast adrift with no social safety net, the women and girls sought the proverbial "golden West", hoping for jobs with good money, which could also give them some extra to send back home to their families.
The paths to the West were many. The Boltzmann Institute said that in their home countries, some of the girls and women had been informed and some went voluntarily, but many were deceived about the true conditions and pay.
In some cases there were marriages of convenience to gain citizenship and entry into an E.U. country. There were also instances of buying and selling domestic servants.