Falon Elizabeth Dunkelberger, 25, of Hollywood, Broward County, Florida, United States and Dimitri David Lubin, 23, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida are being held without bond on charges of human trafficking. The latter is originally from Haiti.
It started when a woman, 21, from a small town in Oklahoma, USA matched with Dunkelberger on Taimi, a social networking and dating app that caters to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) people. The former was struggling financially after she and her son, 1, fled an abusive relationship.
Born in Ukraine, Alex Pasykov created Taimi, which was launched by Social Impact Inc. in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA in 2017. The app is available not only in English but also in Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.
After matching on Tiami, Dunkelberger and the Oklahoma woman continued communicating on Instagram. The former told the latter to come to Miami, Miami-Dade County, Florida where men would pay her to “just be a pretty girl to ride in their car”.
From Oklahoma, the young mother went to Miami with her child on December 1, 2023 and they were taken to a luxury apartment. On December 2, 2023, Dunkelberger told the Oklahoma woman that she had to sleep with men for money.
Dunkelberger then arranged a threesome involving her, the Oklahoma woman and a male client for the price of $1,400 at the Rodeway Inn in South Miami, Miami-Dade County, Florida. On December 5, 2023, Lubin drove the two women to the hotel and they arrived there at around 7:30 p.m.
Lubin stayed in the car with the Oklahoma woman’s son while she and Dunkelberger entered the hotel. Unbeknownst to them, the male client was an undercover detective.
After Dunkelberger received the money at the hotel, the detective arrested the two women. The Oklahoma woman did not tell the authorities about her son that evening but on December 6, 2023, she told an investigator how Dunkelberger had lured her and her son to Miami under false pretenses and her son was still with Lubin.
The Oklahoma woman asked for help to get her son back from Lubin and a task force was deployed to recover the child. After hours of back-and-forth between her and the Haitian man, he was arrested by the task force and the Miami Police Department in cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, the task force and the Miami Police Department.
The child was safely reunited with his mother. Both booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, Lubin was charged with human trafficking, kidnapping and false imprisonment of a child while Dunkelberger was charged with human trafficking, deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution and engaging in prostitution.
CONAN Daily 