Now, he sits in a Florida prison cell, facing the prospect of 15 years to life in jail.

The 37-year-old Jamaican-born man once had hundreds of thousands of dollars in his bank account and an array of expensive toys he liked to show off via his various social media accounts.

What he wasn’t so eager to show the world, however, was how he made his fortune.

The one-time nightclub dancer would seduce beautiful young women then rape, threaten and beat them to force them to work as high end prostitutes.

One of his victims, a 21-year-old Lithuanian woman, told police Baston had coerced her by hanging her by her feet over a fire escape.

He posted his victims' photos and contact details on escort service websites and drove them to and from meetings with clients.

He then kept the thousands of dollars they made for himself.

It is, industry workers agree, a rare scenario in the Australian sex trade.

“This type of relationship based pimping is not so common in Australia,” Candi Forrest, of Queensland sex worker support service Respect Inc, said.

Jules Kim, of Australian sex worker association Scarlet Alliance, agreed.

“It’s not a characteristic of the sex industry in Australia,” she said.

“The vast majority of sex workers choose sex work.”

She said by far the largest threat to the safety of women in the industry in Queensland was that it was still a criminal activity under the state’s law.

“Sex workers are lobbying for decriminalisation of sex work, because it is internationally recognised as the best model of regulation,” she said.

Ms Kim said in addition to better occupational safety, decriminalising the practice gave greater powers to women such as Baston’s victims to escape oppressive situations.

“Within a decriminalised framework if someone doesn’t like where they are working they are able to go and work somewhere else within that industrial rights framework,” she said.

Ms Kim also said despite much media reportage of the trafficking of Asian women for similar exploitation within the Australian industry, there was little evidence it was a widespread practice.

“We were part of the largest research project of the ... [industry] in Australia, and exploitation is not widespread in the sex industry,” she said.

“It is certainly not related to migrant status. There are a lot of myths around Asian sex workers.”

Bond University criminology Assistant Professor Terry Goldsworthy said the national figures supported Ms Kim’s research.

He said just 15 people had been convicted of trafficking Asian women, largely from Thailand, for sex work in Australia between 2004 and 2012.

“They to some degree make easy victims because of the cultural difference, and because they are in minority they are physically vulnerable to these people, who remove their passports and identification and they have no monetary means to escape,” Dr Goldsworthy said.

He said while unreported cases were impossible to gauge, Australia’s stringent border controls made it a far lesser practice in Australia than in other countries of the world.

“If you go by the amount of offenders, convicted offenders, compared to some of the trafficking going on overseas we don’t feature that prominently,” he said.

It was overseas that the long arm of the law finally caught up with Damion St Patrick Baston.

After fleeing Australia in 2011, firstly to Dubai, then to Florida, where he continued to seduce and pimp young women, Baston was arrested in New York late last year.

Following a combined investigative effort by both US and Australian Federal Police, a jury in Miami this week convicted him on 21 charges, largely sex trafficking and money laundering.

He will be sentenced on September 5.