Messages from the phone of Daniel Vorcaro, the jailed former controller of Brazil's collapsed Banco Master, show him paying for and directing the recruitment of women for private parties in Brazil and abroad, among them Ukrainians displaced by Russia's invasion. Federal investigators are examining whether the operation involved children, slavery, or rape trafficking. Nobody has been charged.
Quotations are translated from Portuguese, with key originals in brackets.
In November 2023 a São Paulo party promoter wrote to the banker Daniel Vorcaro: "There's a Ukrainian left over here. Cute. Shall we make war in Brazil?"
Vorcaro answered: "Haha. Great. In this war there has to be some refugee left over for me" ("kkkk. Eba. Nessa guerra tem que sobrar alguma refugiada pra mim").
The promoter reported "3 refugees here", all Ukrainian, and at the end of the month suggested placing them with a model agency: "Let's put them in the agency and then we wash our hands" ("Bora colocar elas na agência e daí lavamos as mãos").
When he told Vorcaro that a Venezuelan woman had been "recruited back", Vorcaro replied: "Excellent. Haha. That one isn't leaving again" ("Top demais. kkkk Essa aí não vai embora mais não").
Natália Portinari, Cézar Feitoza and Fabio Serapião of UOL published the exchanges on 13 October from messages on Vorcaro's devices, which are also in the hands of the Federal Police, and identified the promoter as Diogo Batista.
UOL dates the refugee exchange to 7 November and gives it in shorter form, with Vorcaro replying "There has to be some refugee left over for me" to Batista's report of "3 refugees here [...] Ukrainians" ("Tem 3 refugiadas aqui [...] Ucranianas").
O Globo said the same day that it had confirmed the November 2023 exchanges and published the longer version quoted above, including the Venezuelan woman; it did not say how it had confirmed them. Vorcaro bought Banco Máxima, a small lender, after the Central Bank approved the purchase in October 2019, and turned it into Banco Master. The Central Bank liquidated Master in November 2025, leaving Brazil's deposit guarantee fund with the largest payout in its history. Vorcaro has been in pretrial detention since 4 March 2026 in the bank-fraud case, a separate investigation.
Through his lawyers Vorcaro said on 13 October: "I vehemently deny that I have at any time exploited or disrespected women. That is not in my nature." He said that he did not recognise "the authorship, authenticity and context" of several of the leaked items and called their publication "the criminal manipulation of illegally obtained private messages".
A 19-year-old Ukrainian woman joined Vorcaro's group in October 2023 among the foreign women brought for his Halloween party, UOL reported. Vorcaro, now 43, had turned 40 that month, 21 years older than her; the ages of Batista, Serrano and the other organisers have not been published. She stayed in Brazil after he stopped paying hotels and flights for those who remained. Days after the 7 November exchange Batista sent Vorcaro her passport details so that she could fly with the group to Rio de Janeiro. At the end of November he wrote that she "can't go back to Ukraine because her parents think it better not".
On 14 December, asked how many foreign women were left, he answered:
"Just 1. She has nowhere to go. They're bombing her city."
He said she had travelled 14 hours by bus to leave Ukraine and that her mother had sent her recordings of the bombing.
"I held on to her because she was going to leave to seek refuge in Italy" ("Segurei ela pq ela ia sair pra se refugiar na Itália"), he wrote, adding that she could still join "our agency" and calling her "hot and young" ("Gata e novinha").
He did not say what he told her or whether she could have left; her answer to those questions is what a trafficking inquiry would most need. UOL places the "3 refugees" message in its reporting on her without saying that she was one of them.
The Federal Police and the Office of the Prosecutor-General are examining whether women in Vorcaro's network were sexually exploited or trafficked. Investigators told BBC News Brasil on 16 October that they had found no evidence of physical violence or explicit threats so far and were still examining whether the women's vulnerability had been abused.
The banker and his recruiters
Vorcaro chose which women joined the group and which stayed, approved the payments and set the budget for flights and hotels, according to the messages reported by UOL.
"Let's send them away. Then we bring in whoever we want," he wrote in November 2023. He ordered "selections" of new women in January and February 2024.
On 15 April 2024 he wrote, "Ukraine and Russia, we'll send away";
Batista objected that the Ukrainian woman's country was still at war, and Vorcaro said he would see the women the next day and make a "selection" of who stayed. In January 2025 he told Serrano that no payment for anything of Batista's was to be made "from this year on".
Batista, who received R$120,000 a month from Vorcaro according to UOL, handled the women day to day and deferred to Vorcaro on everything else. "The boss orders and we carry it out" ("Chefe manda e a gente executa"), he wrote, and called himself Vorcaro's "Pit Bull Knight". He did not pay the women without Vorcaro's order: "I don't want to go out and pay them without you telling me to," he wrote after the Halloween party. Batista did not respond to UOL or the BBC, and it is not known whether he has a lawyer.
Leonardo Serrano, who owns SL Consulting, a Florida events company, ran the logistics for trips abroad, according to the messages. He ordered "flowers", his word for the women, from promoters in each city, booked flights and hotels and released money to the women. He billed the women's flights and hotels in Brazil to Prime You ("I'll bill it to Prime"), a company in which Vorcaro was a partner, according to the Senate rapporteur's report. In February 2024 Serrano wrote "I'm not trafficking anything! That's the work of that crazy guy of yours", meaning Batista, and in October 2024 he wrote that he would not be responsible for the people Batista sent. SL Consulting told the BBC that it "under no circumstances had knowledge of or colluded with any illicit activity". Serrano did not respond to UOL.
Tiago Polo, an engineer and businessman who worked with Batista, found women through contacts in the modelling business and brought Vorcaro two agencies to buy. A woman whom the BBC described as a central figure in the investigation, and who has not been named, appears in messages demanding payment for women who attended the parties. No response from Polo or Prime You has been reported.
Serrano counted 74 women at Vorcaro's Halloween party at the Madame Satã nightclub in São Paulo on 31 October 2023, and Batista brought another 40, who were put up in 21 rooms at the Rosewood hotel, UOL reported. Vorcaro's instruction, according to police messages described by Revista Piauí, was "Only young girls. Half from abroad, and the ones from here we know" ("Só menina nova. Metade de fora e as daqui conhecemos"). Federal Police documents put the party's budget at US$4.5 million, and the travel bookings for it included a bus ticket from Kyiv to Warsaw, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Polo had approached the agencies Mega, Ford Models and Joy, all of which deny supplying anyone, according to Piauí. The foreign women in the group came from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Venezuela and Argentina; others were Brazilian, some from the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.
Moriah Asset, an investment firm founded by Vorcaro's brother-in-law, received SL Consulting's bills for the events, and Vorcaro passed them to Banco Master's finance department, UOL reported. Vorcaro's control of the operation's money and membership runs through his messages, and it places him where the law's questions about knowledge and intent would be directed: he chose the women, paid the recruiters and decided who stayed. What the companies that processed the bills knew about the women has not been reported.
How the organisers wrote about the women
Batista and Vorcaro referred to the women as "slaves" ("escravas"), according to UOL. Batista described one as a "trained little slave" ("escravinha doutrinada") and wrote of another: "I'm going to enslave her for today and make her work for us" ("Vou já escravizar ela pra hoje e fazer trabalhar pra gente aí"). When Serrano proposed a shopping allowance of €3,000 a head for eight women at an event in France in June 2024, Vorcaro replied: "It can be 4. These slave girls are amazing" ("Essas meninas escravas são demais"). The youngest women were grouped under the nickname "nursery" ("creche"), a word Vorcaro used to Batista in 2024. In May 2024 Batista proposed splitting the women into a "Team Famiglia A", to be "always with you (trust and little orgy)", and a "B" team "for volume events". In March 2024 he wrote to Vorcaro: "Whoever you chose for the Famiglia, I'm indoctrinating a lot", and said he was waiting for Vorcaro to choose one, "even the [Ukrainian refugee]".
Batista recruited in Brazil and Serrano abroad. Serrano booked the women's travel and rooms and billed the Brazilian costs to Prime You, and Vorcaro decided who was paid and who could stay. When Vorcaro stopped paying for women who remained in Brazil, their housing became their own problem. Batista wanted an agency because it would "help a lot to hold on to these girls" and he could rent a house through it so that it "isn't tied to us" ("Não fica atrelado à gente"). Messages about holding on to women, housing them through an agency so that the arrangement was not tied to the organisers and deciding who could stay go to the centre of what investigators are examining: whether the women depended on the organisers for housing, travel and status in Brazil, and whether that dependence was used to keep them. The messages contain almost nothing written by the women themselves.
Were minors involved? Lawmakers demand an investigation
Vorcaro's order for the Halloween party was for "Only young girls", according to Piauí, and messages cited by the lawmakers below have him asking for "novinhas", a word for young girls. The youngest women in the group were known as the "nursery", and Batista called the Ukrainian refugee "novinha". A preference for youth runs through the published messages, and it is the basis on which two groups of lawmakers have asked the authorities to establish how old the women were and if any children we being trafficked.
The only two women whose ages are published were 19: the Ukrainian refugee, and a Brazilian woman whose 19th birthday party Batista and Vorcaro organised in February 2024, when Vorcaro was 40. The organisers gave the Brazilian woman a nickname taken from a children's cereal. In January 2024, weeks before her birthday, Batista wrote that he would "hold on to" her for the Famiglia, the organisers' word for their inner circle of women;
Vorcaro laughed and replied: "She'll have to join the crime to stay" ("Ela vai ter que entrar pro crime pra ficar").
UOL publishes those two lines without the rest of the exchange and does not say what "the crime" referred to. Shortly before the party Vorcaro wrote that she was "very young" and that he was worried.
Batista answered: "Better with you than with other idiots. You look after her. Famiglia."
The next day Batista wrote that she was "released" and "already waiting for the 'baptism'", and asked Vorcaro to pretend he knew nothing of what Batista "teaches" the women. Vorcaro gave her an iPhone, and Batista later billed him for "the present" at "50k".
The ages of almost all the other women, among the hundreds who attended events from São Paulo to Rome, are currently unknown but estimated to be very young, mostly in their teens. Some of the documents that would establish them are confirmed to be with investigators: the files from Vorcaro's devices, which the Senate rapporteur's report says include images of foreign women's passports, and the travel budgets in Federal Police documents described by Folha. Others would have to be obtained, among them hotel registrations, airline passenger lists and the registration files of the model agencies, including Allure, which denies any relationship with Vorcaro. Nothing published so far shows either that a minor attended any event or that every woman was an adult.
Sâmia Bomfim, a PSOL federal deputy for São Paulo, asked Supreme Court President Edson Fachin in mid-September to investigate possible sexual exploitation of minors at Vorcaro's parties. "What was the age of these 'novinhas'? What situation were they subjected to? Who were the participants at these parties?" she asked, according to Revista Fórum, which reported on 15 September that she stressed the messages alone did not confirm that minors were present. Rádio Pampa and Revista Movimento reported that Fernanda Melchionna, a PSOL federal deputy for Rio Grande do Sul, joined the request. It asks for an examination of guest lists, agency contracts, payments, hotel registrations and electronic communications to establish the women's ages, for any evidence of minors to be sent at once to prosecutors and specialised authorities, and for the matter to be added to the Master inquiries.
Luciene Cavalcante, a PSOL federal deputy, and Carlos Giannazi, a PSOL São Paulo state deputy, asked the Federal Police and the Prosecutor-General's office on 13 October to investigate whether the facts amounted to sexual exploitation, pimping, trafficking in persons and the sexual exploitation of adolescents, and to establish "whether all the women were in fact of age", Metrópoles and Brasil 247 reported. They also asked investigators to examine the women's hiring terms, whether intermediaries profited and any mechanisms of control or dependence. They cited messages reported by Folha, UOL and PlatôBR showing "a preference for young women".
Brazilian law treats the sexual exploitation of anyone under 18 as a separate offence. Article 218-B of the Penal Code punishes subjecting, inducing or attracting a person under 18 into prostitution or another form of sexual exploitation, facilitating it, or preventing or hindering them from leaving it; the same penalty applies to anyone who has sex with a 14 to 17-year-old in that situation and to the owner or manager of the premises where it happens. Article 217-A makes any sexual act with a child under 14 rape of a vulnerable person, regardless of the child's consent. When the parties took place the penalties were four to 10 years and eight to 15 years; a law of December 2025 raised them to seven to 16 and 10 to 18, but a harsher penalty cannot be applied to earlier conduct.
"Adult women can choose how to have sex, and prostitution is not a crime. But in this case it is important to know whether or not minors took part, because sex with a minor under 14 is rape, and with girls aged 14 to 18, sexual exploitation," Luciana Temer, a law professor at PUC-SP and president of the Instituto Liberta, said in Folha's 8 April report.
No response from Fachin to the first request, or from the Federal Police or the Prosecutor-General's office to the second, has been reported. Fachin's own request to the police on 13 October concerned mentions of Supreme Court justices, not the women's ages. The police said in May that they wanted to identify and hear the women, according to O Globo, and identifying them would establish their ages. Investigators hold passport images and travel budgets that could begin to answer the lawmakers' question and could obtain the hotel, airline and agency files that would complete it. No authority has said publicly whether the age of every woman has been verified.
The money behind the parties
UOL calculated from the messages that Vorcaro spent at least R$4.3 million on the recruitment operation from 2023, including money for a São Paulo nightclub. It has not published a breakdown.
Batista's R$120,000 monthly payment ran until January 2025. Serrano also asked Vorcaro to authorise invoices for "Diogo's crew" of R$350,000 in September 2024 and R$260,000 in October 2024. In January 2024 Batista asked for R$500,000 to "get a house for the models"; Vorcaro replied, "And staff only women." Whether the money was paid has not been reported.
In October 2024 Batista wrote that he would stop taking a cut of the women's earnings: "I won't charge the models a percentage any more [...] No more exploiting them like it always was" ("Eu não vou mais cobrar porcentagem das modelos [...] Sem essa de explorar elas como sempre foi").
In it an organiser says he had been taking a share of what the women were paid, and calls that exploitation. A share of the women's earnings is the profit that Brazil's law against pimping punishes; how large it was, from how many women it was taken and what the women were paid for are questions that bank statements and the women themselves could answer. Investigators told the BBC they are examining whether intermediaries took a cut.
In December 2023, according to the messages reported by UOL, Vorcaro received a contract to buy 50 per cent of Allure Eventos, a São Paulo model agency owned by Felipe Nisti Cataldo, for R$1.5 million. Polo had written in October 2023 that Batista saw an agency as a way to "arrange the girls indirectly" ("ajustar as meninas indiretamente"), and had offered Allure and Ford Models, which asked about US$6.7 million for its business, according to Polo.
When the Allure contract was signed in January 2024, Batista wrote: "This way we're shielded!" ("Assim estamos blindados!").
The first R$500,000 went out days later, and Batista asked for two more instalments of R$500,000 between February and May 2024. A receipt on Vorcaro's phone shows the last paid to Nisti by Pix, Brazil's instant-payment system, from Super Empreendimentos, which UOL described as a company Vorcaro used and Times Brasil as one administered by Vorcaro's brother-in-law, Fabiano Zettel. Whether the second instalment was paid has not been reported.
After the payments Vorcaro treated the agency as a channel for recruiting women, UOL reported. In January 2024 he asked Polo to go to the south of Brazil to "fetch some hotties" for "Allure registration".
In February he wrote: "Let's get visas, Famiglia [...] Hire them all through Allure. And book interviews" ("Contratar todas Allure. E marca entrevista").
Batista replied: "Of course. Leave it to me." Allure's registrations and contracts, and any visa applications made in its name, would show whether the order was carried out; no authority has said it has sought them.
Nisti told UOL that Vorcaro was interested in the business but that the talks did not go ahead, denied the arrangement described in the messages and said he would need to check what the R$500,000 transfer to his bank account was for. After publication Allure said in a statement to UOL that it "never had any corporate, commercial or contractual relationship" with Vorcaro or negotiations with him, that it has no involvement in the practices reported and that it works only in fashion and advertising, not events.
UOL located 21 SL Consulting invoices between April 2024 and March 2025 totalling about US$70 million, described as advance budgets for "events, hospitality, lodging and charters". The invoices went to Moriah Asset, a Belo Horizonte investment firm founded by Zettel, and Vorcaro passed them to Banco Master's finance department. How much of the money paid for the women, whether every invoice was settled and whether the bank's own funds settled them has not been reported. Zettel was detained briefly in January 2026 in the bank-fraud investigation; his lawyers said his business is lawful and unrelated to Banco Master's management. No response from Moriah Asset has been reported, and nothing published shows that Zettel knew of the Allure payment or the recruitment.
The €4,000-a-head shopping allowance in France and a request on 7 March 2025 for R$10,000 for a woman who had been at a party are the only published sums tied to individual women.
From São Paulo to London, New York and Rome
London was the largest event abroad. According to the messages, 99 women, seven of them from Brazil, were brought in to work during the 1st Fórum Jurídico Brasil de Ideias (Brazil of Ideas Legal Forum), which Banco Master sponsored from 24 to 26 April 2024 and which senior Brazilian officials attended. Gazeta do Povo put the cost of the London programme at about US$6 million.
"We'll take all the girls' phones," Serrano wrote before the event.
Vorcaro asked Serrano's staff to take women to his hotel room, and the next day ordered more "foreign flowers" for a party in his suite: "If they have good whores you can send them" ("Se eles tiverem puta boa pode mandar"), UOL reported.
O Globo columnist Malu Gaspar reported that a Vorcaro party in a New York presidential suite cost more than US$721,000. Serrano organised the event in France in June 2024. For a party in Rome in October 2024 he counted about 30 women from one local group, about 20 from Batista's and eight from Brazil, and Vorcaro ordered that "NO man is to enter".
Some of the women went on from Rome to Dubai: "I'll leave the nursery here and they go straight to Dubai," Vorcaro wrote.
For Carnival in 2025 Batista asked to bring "about 15 little flowers from abroad" to the parties in Rio de Janeiro, UOL reported.
Foreign women flew to Brazil first class for a party at Trancoso, in Bahia, in October 2022, spent about a month in the country at the Rosewood and a house in Joá, Rio de Janeiro, and travelled on Vorcaro's aircraft, all paid for by Vorcaro according to Federal Police budgets, Folha reported. The messages and documents show the flights, hotels and payments. What the women were told before they travelled, how their trips were described to immigration officials and what each was hired to do are the facts on which a trafficking case would turn, and the travel, hotel and payment documents investigators hold would show who travelled, when and at whose expense.
What the Senate rapporteur alleged
Senator Alessandro Vieira, rapporteur of the Senate's organised crime committee, presented his final report, dated 13 April 2026, on 14 April. Its section on the Master case (section 5.1, pages 61 to 68) summarises a Federal Police report delivered to Justice André Mendonça. According to that summary, the "Cine Trancoso" gatherings at Vorcaro's holiday house in southern Bahia, described as meetings reserved for a small group of authorities, were attended by foreign women from Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Mexico and Venezuela, "recruited and transported with the banker's financial support". The report adds that "a similar event occurred in London in April 2024". The choice of foreign women, "according to the investigators", was meant to stop them recognising the authorities present and to reduce the risk of leaks. Participants had to leave their phones switched off with security guards, and Vorcaro kept an internal camera system.
Vieira's report says that the pension-fraud congressional inquiry obtained access to about 400 GB of files from Vorcaro's phone and cloud storage, including intimate videos, images of the passports of foreign women and material from private parties in Brasília and Trancoso. It concludes: "There are, therefore, indications of crimes related to international trafficking in persons and sexual exploitation, especially considering the conditions of recruitment, transport and lodging of the women involved" ("Há, portanto, indícios de crimes relacionados a tráfico internacional de pessoas e exploração sexual"). Its summary of the case lists "possibly, the intermediation of foreign women in contexts that may constitute sexual exploitation and trafficking in persons" among Vorcaro's "instruments of co-optation". The report names no official as present at the parties.
Gazeta do Povo reported on 16 April that the report described "strong indications" of trafficking, called the women a "bargaining chip" for winning over officials and called the camera system a potential tool for control or blackmail. None of those three descriptions appears in the report's 221 pages. The phrase translated as "strong indications" appears once, in a passage about the rapporteur's case against named authorities for impeachable offences.
Phones were collected at the door of the Halloween party, according to police messages described by Piauí. O Globo reported in May that access to Vorcaro's parties was controlled with phone bans and metal detectors and that he kept an internal camera system, which he said was for personal security. Phone collection and a camera system are therefore documented in reporting separate from the rapporteur's. What the cameras recorded, and what became of the recordings, has not been disclosed; Folha reported in April that there was no official confirmation of which authorities attended events with women or of whether they were recorded.
The committee rejected Vieira's report on 15 April by six votes to four, over his call to indict three Supreme Court justices and the prosecutor-general for their conduct in office, and closed without an approved finding. The vote means the Senate never adopted his conclusions about the parties. It did not test or dismiss the police findings he summarised, which remain in the Supreme Court case file.
Officials in Vorcaro's orbit
Senators Davi Alcolumbre and Rodrigo Pacheco confirmed for the Halloween party, according to guest-list messages described by Piauí, and Justice Dias Toffoli said he would try to attend. All three deny going, and nothing published shows that they did.
Supreme Court justices, the prosecutor-general, the Federal Police director-general and the president of the Chamber of Deputies were among the guests whose travel to the London forum was covered, Poder360 reported. Their attendance at a public legal event is documented, and UOL's messages place 99 women in London during the same forum. No published message places any official with the women.
On 28 February 2025 an employee at Vorcaro's São Paulo apartment wrote: "I lent the room next door to the minister with five girls." On 7 March a woman asked Vorcaro for R$10,000 for a friend who, she wrote, had stayed with "Kassio"; Vorcaro asked for payment details, according to the messages. UOL and Piauí have suggested that "Kassio" could be Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, who presides over the Superior Electoral Court. The messages do not use his full name, do not identify the "minister" and do not show whether the money was paid. His office said that he "never exchanged messages with him nor asked the banker for anything". He has not been accused of wrongdoing. On 13 October Fachin asked the Federal Police to send him every mention of Supreme Court justices in the Master investigation; no reply has been reported.
Nunes Marques is among four Supreme Court justices whom Federal Police data cross-checks identified as having flown on aircraft linked to Vorcaro or his companies, according to the Senate rapporteur's report, which says he travelled with his wife to Maceió. The electoral court he presides over will oversee the 25 October presidential runoff between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.
Flávio Bolsonaro has his own documented financial connections to Vorcaro. Federal Police records detail their meetings and negotiations over R$134 million in financing for a film about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro. Reporting indicates that Vorcaro provided approximately R$61 million. Vorcaro's brother-in-law, Fabiano Zettel, also donated R$3 million to Jair Bolsonaro's 2022 presidential campaign. In a rejected plea-bargain proposal, Vorcaro alleged that donations to Bolsonaro and São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas were part of a bribery arrangement, an allegation disputed by those implicated. Flávio has acknowledged seeking financing for the film but denies any improper exchange of benefits.
Investigators are asking whether Vorcaro used the parties to buy access to politicians, officials and business figures, the BBC reported. Answering it would mean establishing who was with the women, whether their company was offered as a benefit and whether anything was given in return; the "minister" and "Kassio" messages are the only published references that might bear on it.
What the authorities knew, and when
The earliest written complaint published so far came from the owner of a house Vorcaro rented in Trancoso, who wrote to him on 5 October 2022 about prostitutes and about guest numbers far above those agreed, according to O Globo. Vorcaro told his then fiancée, Martha Graeff, on 18 August 2025 that the parties were part of his "business" and that he had held "300 of that kind", according to messages reported by Folha de S.Paulo and cited in the Senate rapporteur's report.
Federal Police took Vorcaro's devices during Operation Compliance Zero, which began with his arrest in November 2025 and continued in phases in December 2025 and January 2026. When each device was seized and its contents extracted has not been published, and investigators have not said when they first found the messages about the women. Access to the data was contested from the start. Justice Toffoli removed the pension-fraud inquiry's access to it late in 2025. In March 2026 Justice Mendonça, the rapporteur of the Master case, barred the inquiry from new data, and the police said files had been reinserted into its system outside the chain of custody, Band reported. Nothing published connects those custody disputes to the inquiry into the women.
In January 2026 Lucas Furtado, a prosecutor attached to the Federal Court of Accounts, asked the court to identify the senior officials who attended the Trancoso parties. The court archived the request on 19 February, finding no link to federal funds within its jurisdiction, Jornal Grande Bahia reported. On 8 April Folha reported that, by cross-checking interviews, social-media posts and Federal Police documents, it had identified 20 of the women, 14 with public Instagram profiles; approached by the newspaper, none commented.
O Globo reported on 7 May that the Federal Police wanted to identify and hear the women, whom investigators treated as possible victims, to establish whether a structured network of sexual exploitation existed, separately from the fraud case. UOL reported on 13 October that the police had opened a preliminary investigation into the participation of foreign escorts and possible irregularities in how they were hired; it did not give an opening date. On 16 October the BBC reported that the police and the Prosecutor-General's office were still mapping the network in a preliminary phase and had not opened a formal inquiry into Vorcaro's personal responsibility. All three reports rest on unnamed sources. Neither the police nor the prosecutors have commented publicly, and when investigators first treated possible exploitation as a concern has not been disclosed; the earliest published date is May 2026.
No published report says that any woman has been contacted or interviewed, or identified as a victim, since the police took Vorcaro's devices in late 2025, or that investigators have obtained files from Allure or the other agencies. Investigators told the BBC they want to hear women now living abroad and expect many to refuse. Vorcaro has had two plea-bargain proposals in the bank-fraud case rejected and is seeking a third, O Globo reported. Folha's report on the women, the Senate report and O Globo's report of the police's intentions were all public before the first round of the presidential election on 4 October. UOL published the messages about the Ukrainian women 12 days before the runoff.
What investigators must establish
Investigators want to know whether the women were hired for sex or only to be present, whether intermediaries kept part of their pay, whether their vulnerability was exploited and whether any official received improper benefits.
Prostitution between adults is legal in Brazil. Profiting from it is not. Article 230 of the Penal Code punishes taking advantage of another person's prostitution by sharing directly in the profits with one to four years in prison. Article 228 punishes inducing or attracting someone into prostitution or another form of sexual exploitation, facilitating it, or preventing or hindering someone from leaving it, with two to five years. Batista's message about no longer charging the models a percentage, and his messages about holding on to women, are the kind of evidence investigators would test against those provisions; no published evidence shows that any woman was prevented from leaving.
Under Article 149-A, trafficking means recruiting, transporting, housing or receiving a person "by means of serious threat, violence, coercion, fraud or abuse" for one of five purposes, sexual exploitation among them. It carries four to eight years in prison, increased by a third to a half if the victim is taken out of Brazil. A victim's consent does not count if it was obtained by any of those means. UOL reported that courts have generally required some form of violence or coercion for the international offence.
Article 149 punishes reducing a person to a condition analogous to slavery, through forced labour, exhausting hours, degrading conditions or restricting movement for a debt, with two to eight years in prison. The organisers' word for the women, "slaves", is not evidence of that offence; no investigator or court has found that any woman was enslaved, held against her will or forced to work.
Recruitment, transport and housing are in the messages. Prosecutors would also have to prove the means: that a woman was threatened, coerced or deceived, or that someone deliberately used her circumstances to recruit her or keep her working. Brazil's humanitarian visa gave displaced Ukrainians two years of temporary residence. Displacement, distance from family and reliance on others for housing and travel are the circumstances investigators look at when they examine abuse of vulnerability. Financial dependence alone does not make a woman a trafficking victim, and the absence of violence does not rule out coercion. From what has been published, the recruitment, travel, housing and payment of the women and the organisers' stated purposes are documented; the means are not. Investigators told the BBC they had found no violence or explicit threats so far, none of the women has been quoted, Vorcaro disputes the messages and nobody has been charged. Indications that a crime may have occurred are enough to open an inquiry; a charge needs evidence of the offence and sufficient indication of who committed it, and a conviction needs proof. The women's testimony would settle what they were promised and whether they could refuse.
The Ukrainian woman
The messages place Vorcaro at the head of an operation that recruited women in Brazil and sent them to London, New York, France, Rome and Dubai. He paid his main recruiter a monthly retainer, contracted to buy half of a model agency that denies any relationship with him and ordered that the women be hired through it, and the event invoices passed through his brother-in-law's investment firm to his bank's finance department. His recruiter wrote of holding on to a refugee who had nowhere to go and of taking a percentage of the women's earnings. Investigators hold, or could obtain by court order, the documents that would answer what the messages leave open: the payments that would show what the women were paid and who kept a share, Allure's registrations and any visa applications, the Federal Police report on Trancoso in the Supreme Court file and the full threads behind the "minister" and "Kassio" messages, and the passports and travel documents that would establish every woman's age. Authorities haven't confirmed if they've inquired with any of the women since the police took Vorcaro's devices in late 2025, or that it has opened a formal inquiry into Vorcaro's own role.
A São Paulo bankruptcy court froze assets attributed to Vorcaro and his family on 23 March 2026, among them a mansion in Lago Sul, Brasília, held through Super Empreendimentos; a duplex penthouse in Jardim Paulista and apartments in Vila Nova Conceição, São Paulo; properties in Belo Horizonte, Nova Lima, Ouro Preto and Angra dos Reis; the Hotel Botanique in Campos do Jordão; and a mansion in Windermere, Florida, Times Brasil reported. Federal Police reports describe a house in the Jardins district of São Paulo paid for in 2025 through his company Viking Participações and a property in the Belvedere district of Belo Horizonte bought in 2022. Whether he owns Villa 21, a 40,000 m² beachfront estate in Trancoso's Terravista condominium, is disputed: Metrópoles reported that he bought it in 2023, and O Globo columnist Lauro Jardim described him as a tenant.
In São Paulo, Vorcaro's parties were held at the Madame Satã nightclub, the Rosewood and Unique hotels, a private area of the Fasano hotel in Itaim Bibi, which once belonged to the Master group, and his own apartment, where an employee lent "the room next door to the minister with five girls"; Folha also reported private bars set up inside Banco Master's headquarters and the Faria Lima offices of its holding company, Titan. Women were lodged in a house in Joá, in Rio de Janeiro, and brought to Rio for Carnival. In Bahia the gatherings were at Trancoso, and the Senate rapporteur's report describes private parties in Brasília. Abroad, the messages and reports place Vorcaro's events at the Connaught and Peninsula hotels and the Annabel's club in London, a presidential suite in New York, events in France and Rome, Dubai and, during the Lisbon legal forum, a parallel programme of parties in Portugal.
The 19-year-old Ukrainian woman was among the "extras" sent to a dinner Vorcaro held for guests at Pappa Bar in São Paulo in March 2024, after Batista asked him: "Shall I send [the two]? Our refugees?" A month later Vorcaro decided to send away the Ukrainian and Russian women and said he would hold a selection of who stayed. The reporting does not say whether she stayed, what she was paid or where she is now. In December 2023 Batista had told Vorcaro that her mother was sending her recordings of the bombing of her city and that she had been about to leave Brazil for Italy. Batista told Vorcaro that he had held on to her. His messages have been published. Nothing has been heard from her.
