Hunting the Hunters: Tracing Human Traffickers
Take a deep dive into how cybercriminals fuel human trafficking on the internet. Discover the promising role of OSINT in unmasking these elusive criminals.
Ever-Evolving Business Model
Almost everything in our lives has been fundamentally altered by the internet in the last two decades, including the way we buy and sell each other. Technology has reduced the risks and costs of criminal activities across jurisdictions through social media and online marketplaces, mobile payments, digital currencies, and advanced software. Criminals, such as human traffickers, are using technology to expand human trafficking further and faster by using human beings as commodities. They take advantage of social media to recruit victims, gain access to an unlimited amount of buyers, and monitor victims virtually before laundering proceeds electronically. In terms of risk, the internet has also anonymized the identities of criminals and facilitators making them even more invisible in an already highly populated virtual world. Therefore, with society getting more and more comfortable online, human traffickers are constantly integrating and upgrading technology into their business model throughout the process from recruiting to exploiting their victims. They are known to adapt quickly to changing opportunities and risks, which means they may operate one way in one region, but differently in another. As well as, if one website is shut down or platform, they will just move on to the next one.
Different groups may employ different tactics from one year to the next. They choose their methods and techniques on profitability, ease of recruitment, and the risk of detection by law enforcement. Their business model has evolved extensively to follow the market. Now these criminals can operate and manage an online business without having the physical infrastructure that was needed to conduct human trafficking operations in the past and with less man-power. The ease of recruitment that the internet provides has a less likelihood of being identified. Due to many individuals documenting their day to day lives online, traffickers now implement an effective recruitment strategy that involves profiling their victims. Social media platforms allow them to do this, because it provides a multitude of personal and behavioral information about the victim that can be leveraged by the trafficker. By monitoring these platforms, you may be able to identify suspicious activity, such as posts offering sex for money or job opportunities that seem too good to be true.
The availability of the internet has dramatically widened customer access to commercial sex and allowed exploiters to advertise human trafficking victims and mask their activities. Since geographical barriers do not exist online, criminals can reach a large pool of potential buyers more efficiently. While escort services is a common business model for sex trafficking, remote sexual acts, or use of webcams, are also marketed through these platforms. A victim can be in one country, trafficker in another, and the buyer in a completely separate continent. Once a buyer is engaged on a social network or site, the actual remote interactive sexual act will typically take place on a more sexually explicit live streaming site. Victims can be exploited repeatedly through websites and the amount of times their abuse is viewed can be unlimited. Leading to another major point that victims can be completely separated from their trafficker and still be exploited online even for years after.
Are Human Traffickers on the Dark Web?
In order to reach an endless amount of buyers, they advertise their victims over listings, by simply conversing on forums, and posting advertisements on sexual services websites, rather than the dark web. From a business perspective, the dark web is not easily accessible to the typical sex buyer. The user must be aware of the specific web location of the website or marketplace they want to access in order to be able to access the advertisements. Also to access the dark web, a user must use a specialized browser, which is beyond the abilities of many potential buyers.
Using OSINT to Hunt the Hunters
Emerging technologies, however, offer a number of opportunities. Increasing availability of online data, extensive analytics, and data analysis technologies have led to an increase in information that can be used for gathering intelligence, developing leads, and consolidating evidence. There are several indicators online that can suggest that someone is a victim of trafficking, including signs of physical abuse, coercion, and control; lack of personal identification documents; and restricted communication with others. Being aware of these indicators can help you identify potential cases of trafficking.
OSINT can be used to identify individuals who may be at risk of being trafficked, such as those who are vulnerable due to poverty, lack of education, or political instability. Social media platforms can provide valuable insights into the activities and relationships of potential victims. OSINT can be used to track the activities of traffickers, including their travel patterns, financial transactions, and online communications. This can help law enforcement agencies identify and locate traffickers and their victims.
OSINT can be used to map illicit networks of activity and identify specific individuals, providing it with a much broader scope than previously believed. As a result of a network analysis, investigators are able to establish a link between more localized, seemingly separate trafficking operations. Since human trafficking is a nexus crime, their criminal networks conducting other illicit activity may also be revealed. Additionally, OSINT allows for the mapping of illicit networks of activity and the identification of specific individuals, giving its reach a much broader scope than previously anticipated. It is possible for investigators to link seemingly separate trafficking operations from several cities, which had previously been known to law enforcement, to a larger international organized crime network by analyzing a network. In addition, organized crime networks can be mapped along with advertisements, movement, and exploitation of victims in a destination country.
Two Levels of Human Trafficking
There are generally two scales of human trafficking prevention and eradication: that of individuals and that of large criminal organizations. Human traffickers can recruit and exploit vulnerable individuals individually and systematically; on the other hand, human traffickers, particularly large organizations that also traffic in other illegal materials, take advantage of loopholes in laws and technology to reduce risks, lower costs, and increase the efficiency of their activities by exploiting loopholes in laws and technology. For human trafficking to be solved, it is essential to protect victims and potential victims on an individual level. As well as collecting evidence for prosecution of individual traffickers and buyers, it is also possible to identify and disrupt the connections between traffickers. OSINT-based techniques can be very effective at preventing human trafficking on an individual basis.
By using OSINT methods, a skilled analyst can examine social media and public websites for patterns of behavior. When a victim of exploitation is identified, public information can be obtained to determine how far they have been exploited. These types of information can be useful both to bring down individual traffickers and to dismantle criminal organizations that profit from human trafficking. Additionally, they can be used to examine how human traffickers recruit and control their victims through the exploitation cycle. On the other hand, in order to address human trafficking on a larger scale, a number of solutions exist, including identifying and addressing business relationships between traffickers and supply chains, identifying vulnerable environments, and studying patterns of human trafficking so as to determine the locations of trafficking. Furthermore, solutions must include considerations for helping the trafficked victims as well through rehabilitation and reintegration support systems. Helping the victims heal the psychosociological damage that the traffickers have caused through extensive coercion and manipulation tactics used in the exploitation process.
Studying the methods and techniques that human traffickers use online, can better equip the public and provide a roadmap for law enforcement. Regarding law enforcement and public safety, the constant development of new online strategies and change in operational models used by traffickers can make it very difficult for law enforcement to keep up with them. Unless law enforcement is armed with data analytics, training, and OSINT tools, it is limited in its ability to uncover large bodies of advertisements posted by criminals across a wide range of platforms. Open-source intelligence gathering can be utilized by law enforcement to generate actionable intelligence from large amounts of data, enabling them to document criminal actions. As a result of the use of open source data and analysis, federal, state, local, and international law enforcement agencies have been able to gather evidence more effectively than in the past.
We Have EYES in the Dark
Transnational criminal networks use the internet to radicalize, recruit, train, finance, and incite. For intelligence purposes, our team will locate websites, materials, and networks. These will enable law enforcement agencies to arrest nefarious individuals who plan exploitation-related crimes and prevent these crimes from happening.
These human trafficking networks advertise exploitative services with usernames, email addresses, and phone numbers, among other identifiers. The combination of this information with other indicators, warning signs, and behaviors associated with human trafficking can assist law enforcement in initiating investigations and building cases. In conjunction with open-source intelligence tools, email addresses can prove to be valuable leads for identifying additional online accounts. You can search separately for online accounts where the local part of an email address (the part before the domain) is used as a username by looking at the local part of an email address. Through this method, we can uncover full or partial names, physical appearance information, and a timeline of recent online activity for potential leads. There are several data analysis tools available that can help you identify patterns and anomalies that may suggest human trafficking. For example, you could use social media monitoring tools to track keywords related to trafficking or analyze online transaction data to identify patterns of financial activity that may be associated with trafficking.
By gaining a better understanding of criminal activity through OSINT, we can expand the intelligence picture or narrative. However, It is important to note that identifying cases of human trafficking using open source intelligence is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of the crime and its indicators. While OSINT can be a valuable tool in the fight against human trafficking, it should always be used in conjunction with other investigative techniques and should adhere to ethical and legal standards. As such, it is recommended that you seek training and guidance from experts in the field before attempting to identify potential cases of trafficking.
Happy Hunting!
Alisa Gbiorczyk