At the turn of the twentieth century, traffickers - who were called raiders of girl-flesh or “traders of virtues” - figured prominently in Metropole tabloids as icons of moral degeneration and societal collapse. Together with prostitutes, demi-mondaines and pimps, traffickers played a central role in the public discourse on social and moral degeneration, known as the “White Slave Trade” panic. They played the villain in many lewd and graphic tales about the increasing dangers of urban life that came to be part of a wider classed and gendered global critique of social change, human mobility and interconnectedness.The mass moral panic revolving around the figures of trafficked and sexually exploited girls and children was prominent in metropolitan and colonial sites. In fact it was a white imperial construct (Deveraux 2006) that indexed a whole set of racialized, sexed and gendered colonial anxieties about the “degeneration” of imperial order. This paper explores these issues through a micro-history of a peculiar case of alleged child abduction in 1914 Egypt, the ‘Nazifa Bint Omar’ case, a Syrian girl brought into Egypt by a Zanzibari woman. It compares the ways in which diverse sources - court papers, the press and social purity literature - presented the case, often fictionalizing it, and argues that some of the discursive strategies served the different agendas of advocates of social and moral reform. The Nazifa case was reworked into a “white slavery” narrative by William Nicholas Willis in his Anti-Christ in Egypt (1914), forcefully illustrating the ways in which metropolitan accounts of moral panic and social control reinforced themselves by using colonial settings, in the process obliterating context-specific material configurations of gender, age, labour and scarcity.