Improve Human Trafficking Investigations
Human trafficking is almost unimaginably prevalent. Defined by the United Nations as the act of “recruiting, harboring or obtaining” a person for labor “through the use of force, fraud, or coercion,”[1] the FBI believes it to be the world’s third most-often committed crime,[2] with an estimated 24.9 million victims worldwide.[3] In fact, the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists estimates that traffickers enslave another human being every four seconds.[4] Illicit proceeds from human trafficking total $150 billion a year.[5]
The problem is so severe that more than 183 countries have ratified or acceded to the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.[6] And Target 8.7 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals calls for “immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour” and “end human slavery.”[7]
Given the scope and severity of human trafficking, it may be surprising to learn that prosecution rates for this crime are abysmal — conviction rates even worse. The U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report notes that, in the 188 countries surveyed, court systems prosecuted only about 15,791 human traffickers in 2024.[8] Fewer than 8,000 were convicted. And according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, fewer than 10% of traffickers investigated each year are ever prosecuted.[9]
Human trafficking: a worldwide travesty
Human traffickers threaten vulnerable people around the globe, preying on those living in extreme poverty; people lacking strong family or social networks; people living in politically disorganized or unstable regions; and people suffering through natural disasters. Children are a particular target. In fact, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 20% of human trafficking victims are children.10 Lack of social or governmental safety nets often means trafficking victims are never even reported as missing.
Victims are typically trafficked for purposes of:
Sex
Trafficked women and children are often forced into sex work. This includes prostitution, pornography, dancing in strip clubs, and labor in “spas” and “massage parlors” that serve as fronts for prostitution rings. In the case of child victims, many are used for the creation of child sexual abuse materials.
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Piercing the Shadows: Combat Human Trafficking with Babel Street
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Babel Street Solutions Help Detect Human Trafficking
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OSINT Helps Law Enforcement Detect and Prevent Human Trafficking
In Cambodia, 10,000 people — often entire families, including children — work as bonded laborers in the massive brick kilns that fuel China’s construction indus...
Use Case
Using Babel Street to Detect Human Trafficking
How Babel Street helps detect signs of human trafficking and improve investigations
How traffickers procure their victims
Traffickers employ a variety of tactics to procure victims. A businessman visits an impoverished village, promising young people good jobs in a large Asian city. The youth follow him out of the country. Once they reach their destination, the businessman confiscates their passports. He forces them to work for 18 hours each day, for little or no pay, in sweatshops that produce knock-off electronics. The head of a prostitution ring hires thugs to monitor an unmanned Mexico/United States border crossing. These men lie in wait until they see young, undocumented women attempting to cross. The criminals then kidnap them for use in the prostitution ring. A trafficker convinces desperate parents in a famine-stricken country that he can guarantee a better life for their children by finding them adoptive parents in Western Europe. Parents relinquish custody, and the children are used for the creation of child sexual abuse materials.
In addition to their efforts in the real world, traffickers also trawl modern social media platforms, dating sites and career sites for prospective victims. According to the FBI, traffickers recruit victims through job offers — carefully worded to sound legitimate — placed on social media and professional sites. They woo potential victims on dating apps to get women to visit their “beaus” in the trafficker’s home country, where they are ensnared in prostitution rings or forced labor.[13]
The ascendance of artificial intelligence has made online trafficking easier. According to the U.S. Department of State, traffickers use AI’s social media monitoring capabilities to search for vulnerable individuals and populations.[14] They depend on artificial intelligence to write and translate better, more nuanced “want ads” — ads that more strongly resonate with intended victims. Chatbots reassuringly answer questions “applicants” have about employment. Deep fake videos may be created by traffickers to depict happy, healthy employees cheerfully working in clean, well-lit factories — further assuaging the worries of potential victims.
The challenges of investigating trafficking
Different agencies around the globe investigate human trafficking. These include national law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the National Crime Agency in the United Kingdom, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Australian Federal Police, and others. Many of these agencies — including the FBI — have dedicated human trafficking task forces. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime works with these agencies to support cross-border and worldwide efforts to stop trafficking. Customs and border security agents also play a role, striving to spot potential traffickers and victims at the border. They all face similar investigative challenges.
Human trafficking is hard to spot, and, therefore, hard to prosecute. As noted, traffickers prey on vulnerable people who may never be reported as “missing.” Second, traffickers’ techniques are growing increasingly sophisticated, with highly organized networks that law enforcement agencies often find hard to infiltrate and dismantle. Difficulties in piercing trafficking networks are exacerbated by traffickers’ use of the dark web. Sites on the dark web are notoriously difficult to reach, making trafficking hard to detect, and trafficking networks hard to map and follow.
The cross-border nature of trafficking creates additional prosecution challenges. Trafficking rings can span multiple countries, jurisdictions, and legal systems. Multiple languages may be used in the commission of trafficking. Regional mores can blur the lines between crime and culture. For example, some regions consider child marriages to be human trafficking, other cultures may condone the practice.[15]
Lack of awareness sometimes has law enforcement arresting the wrong people. Too often, officers mistake trafficked agricultural workers for illegal aliens. Women trafficked for sex are mistaken for prostitutes. They are treated as criminals rather than victims.
Finally, human trafficking is a severely underreported crime. Fear of retaliation, fear of law enforcement, and feelings of shame about their plights too often leave human trafficking victims hesitant to seek help. And law enforcement can’t investigate cases it doesn’t know about.
Improving detection with risk intelligence
Risk intelligence can help law enforcement more easily spot traffickers and trafficking operations.
Risk intelligence is a type of open-source intelligence (OSINT) gleaned from searching, collecting, coalescing, and analyzing publicly- and commercially available information (PAI/CAI). AI-powered risk intelligence platforms can help investigators:
Find traffickers. Investigators can use risk intelligence platforms to examine social media sites, dating apps, professional platforms, and discussion boards for the type of posts and advertisements that may indicate a human trafficking operation. For example, a series of advertisements for suspiciously well-paying domestic jobs targeting citizens of an underdeveloped country that recently suffered a natural disaster may signal a trafficker at work.
Investigators can also search these sites for the types of language that indicate other types of human trafficking operations. For example, overly sexualized language used to advertise a “day spa” or “massage parlor” may indicate that the institution acts as a front for a prostitution ring.
Combining risk intelligence with law enforcement-privileged information can help stop trafficking activities. Consider this. Cambodian girls and women are often trafficked into China for the purposes of forced marriage.18 If risk intelligence or law enforcement-privileged information indicates the same man regularly travels with several young girls from Phnom Penh to Beijing — booking a hotel room close to Beijing Daxing International Airport, and staying for only one night each trip — law enforcement may decide his activities merit a trafficking investigation. Similar information can help investigators identify trafficking hotspots.
Pierce trafficking networks. Analyzing online connections, communications, financial transactions, and digital footprints can help law enforcement find and map trafficking networks.
Rescue victims. By monitoring social media platforms and other sites for coded messages of distress, risk intelligence platforms can help law enforcement spot and aid victims.
Improve prosecutions. Risk intelligence can provide valuable evidence for prosecuting traffickers and dismantling trafficking networks. Collecting digital evidence, including communications and advertisements, helps authorities build stronger cases.
Raise awareness. Risk intelligence on trafficking trends and tactics can be used to inform awareness efforts — helping individuals to keep themselves safe, and government agencies to craft strategies that keep pace with evolving trafficking methods.
The human trafficking web
“Trafficker” or “human trafficker” is the most-often used phrase to describe those who enslave other human beings for the purposes of forced labor or sexual abuse. However, there are several categories of criminals who make human trafficking possible.
Recruiters identify and approach potential victims — either in real life or online — luring them into situations where they can be exploited. They may be paid for each person they entrap.
Traffickers are people directly involved in transporting and harboring victims for use in forced labor or sex work, employing tactics such as fraud, deception, and force.
Facilitators are criminals who provide logistical support to traffickers. They may arrange transportation; provide safe houses; bribe officials to ignore signs or instances of trafficking; and launder the money made from trafficking.
How Babel Street can help
The amount of data available for search doubles every two years. How can law enforcement possibly collect and analyze it for the insight needed to spot and stop human trafficking?
The Babel Street Risk Intelligence Platform is a mission-focused data and analytics system that rapidly aggregates structured and unstructured data from thousands of online sources. Leveraging advanced AI, the platform extracts human trafficking intelligence from the analysis of terabytes of online data. This includes data originating from the surface web, social media platforms, mainstream media sites, and government domains. Unique to the industry, Babel Street understands dozens of languages, and translates results into the user’s language of choice. Always-on monitoring keeps searches running regardless of whether anyone is actively using them, appending new information to each search term as that information is uncovered.
Babel Street further enhances investigations through searches of the dark web — or web sites that are inaccessible by standard search engines. Because the nature of the tools used to access the dark web ensure anonymity, it is a hotbed of illegal activity — including human trafficking. Dark web search capabilities enable investigators to quickly and efficiently find information they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access.
In addition, Babel Street can help investigators better understand human trafficking networks. Babel Street rapidly maps key relationships within social networks. It automatically examines hundreds or thousands of relationships, uncovering previously unknown or hidden connections, and identifying those participants who wield the most influence. Graph-powered clarity helps law enforcement visualize and understand these relationships.
Anonymity is important to these searches. Law enforcement professionals don’t want traffickers to know they’re being investigated. Babel Street provides a protected virtual environmentthat enables investigators to analyze online sources without risking their organizations’ infrastructure or compromising their own identities. For those investigating transnational trafficking rings, Babel Street offers secure and anonymized ingress/egress to hard-to-reach or foreign-access- denied sites worldwide.
Babel Street helps law enforcement obtain the insight needed to detect trafficking recruitment methods, recruitment advertising, trafficking networks, and trafficking patterns. These capabilities aid law enforcement officials and others in finding traffickers, and in building the strong prosecutorial cases that can help stop them.
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FAQs
The United Nations defines human trafficking as the act of “recruiting, harboring or obtaining” a person for labor “through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.”
Endnotes
1. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Human Trafficking,” accessed April 2024, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-Trafficking/Human-Trafficking.html
2. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Public Service Announcement: Human Traffickers Continue to Use Popular Online Platforms to Recruit Victims,” March 2020, https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA200316
3. Ecker, Emm: “Breaking Down Global Estimates of Human Trafficking: Human Trafficking Awareness Month 2022,” Human Trafficking Institute, January 2022, https://traffickinginstitute.org/breaking-down-global-estimates-of-human-trafficking-human-trafficking-awareness-month-2022/#:~:text=24.9%20million%20victims%20of%20human%20trafficking&text=The%2024.9%20million%20figure%20includes,every%20region%20of%20the%20world.
4. Krupena, Silvija, “Human Trafficking: Detection and Investigations,” ACAMS Today, January 2023, https://www.acamstoday.org/human-trafficking-detection-and-investigations/
5. Ibid
6. United Nations, “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime,” November 2000, https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/protocol-prevent-suppress-and-punish-trafficking-persons
7. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, accessed April 2024, https://www.unodc.org/roseap/en/sustainable-development-goals.html#:~:text=Target%208.7%20%2D%20Take%20immediate%20and,labour%20in%20all%20its%20forms
8. U.S. Department of State, “2025 Trafficking in Persons Report,” accessed January 2026, https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/
9. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024,” accessed January 2026, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/2024/GLOTIP2024_BOOK.pdf
10. Ibid
11. Qian, Isabelle, “7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp,” The New York Times, December 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/myanmar-cyber-scam.html
12. Jackson, Will, “US Trafficking in Persons report says Cambodian officials complicit in human trafficking for online scams,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, June 2024, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/us-report-cambodia-complicit-human-trafficking-online-scams/104020954
13. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Public Service Announcement: Human Traffickers Continue to Use Popular Online Platforms to Recruit Victims,” March 2020, https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA200316
14. U.S. Department of State, “2025 Trafficking in Persons Report,” accessed January 2026, https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/
15. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Forced Marriage,” accessed April 2024, https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/forced-marriage
16. U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2023, https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-trafficking-in-persons-report/
17. Ibid
18. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024: Cambodia Events of 2023,” accessed April 2024, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/cambodia#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20Office%20of,%2C%20South%20Asia%2C%20and%20China.
Disclaimer:
All names, companies, and incidents portrayed in this document are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, companies, and products are intended or should be inferred.