The Digital Tracks of Trafficking
The rise of the Internet and digital platforms allow many around the world to perform activities with ease and flexibility, bridging the gaps of distance and income. However, with this, human traffickers have also gained advantages by exploiting digital systems, expanding their reach to many more.
As traditional barriers of physical and geological limitations are removed and the tools offered on many common digital platforms, traffickers have been given the capability to better recruit, control, exploit, and promote their victims with much less suspicion over the years. Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Ghada Waly, comments: “To protect people, we need to protect digital spaces from criminal abuse”.
With the increased usage of the Internet comes an increase in the opportunity for individuals to become targeted. Due to the vast amount and variety of content found online, traffickers have an unlimited number of methods to disguise their recruitments. Technology makes finding and controlling victims much simpler, especially with the need for meet-ups being completely eliminated in some instances. “Traffickers are quick to adapt their business model to suit their needs and increase their profits, so, of course, they follow online trends,” explains Tiphanie Crittin, a UNODC Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer.
Oftentimes, traffickers create fake websites and job postings. Features on these sites can allow personal information, such as location and passport details, to quickly be shared through chats. Social media, video gaming, and dating sites are also commonly found to be used. The evidence of how much these methods are used is staggering; with 80% of the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2020 sex trafficking prosecutions involving online advertising. Due to the open nature of these sites gravitating users to share their personal information and location, they make for an area that traffickers can effortlessly take advantage of to obtain information.
It is also known that trafficking organizations record and live stream their exploitations, allowing them to sell this to third-party sites to raise quick profits, at no additional costs to themselves. This leaves many victims unsure and vulnerable as there is no limit on how far their content can reach and how many times it will be viewed.
The anonymous nature of the Internet, especially the dark net, aids traffickers in hiding illegal materials and their real identities from investigators. An example of this is large money-laundering chains aimed to instantly receive, transfer, and hide an organization’s profits between international members, all through various cryptocurrencies. Additionally, the global nature of this crime adds more complexity to being able to effectively combat it. “When a crime is planned in one country, with victims in another country, and a customer in a third one, law enforcement authorities face practical challenges such as finding and securing evidence, as any investigation requires cooperation across borders and a certain level of digital expertise”.
While traffickers have advanced in their perpetration, technology still gives authorities better methods at dealing with them. Researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Technology Group have been using natural language processing to identify unique phrases in content circulated by traffickers to create fake advertisements. These are then cross-referenced across advertisements from multiple sites until similarities begin to appear. This helps authorities find patterns in recruitment tactics and can help in the discovery of specific trafficking operations. As technological advancements innovate new combative measures in coming years, more trafficking organizations will slowly, but surely, be eliminated.