Tech Versus Trafficking: Disrupting the Business Model of Exploitation

Contributors: Tim Rhydderch

Technology powers human trafficking – but it can also disrupt it.

Almost 50 million people are enslaved globally – more than at any point in history. Human trafficking, an industry worth up to $498 billion, is run by agile, borderless criminal networks that move people, profit and information with alarming ease. These networks have embraced digital tools: recruitment often begins online, with victims advertised through platforms and messaging apps, and payments that once changed hands in cash now take place digitally. Encrypted messaging and the dark web give traffickers anonymity and global reach. Every stage of exploitation is now enabled or concealed by tech.

This is precisely why we must use technology to disrupt the business model of trafficking.

A smarter, more strategic response is possible – and urgently needed.

Too often, government efforts are reactive, fragmented and outdated. Trafficking routes span all countries, forming a global supply chain that criminal groups exploit with growing sophistication. These routes typically flow from poorer regions to wealthier ones, responding to demand for cheap labour or commercial sex across national borders.

Despite the international scale of the threat, data-sharing remains constrained by legacy infrastructure, unclear legal frameworks and siloed systems. The existence of 43 individual police forces in England and Wales results in a patchwork of incompatible systems, making it harder to identify links across investigations or understand how perpetrators operate nationally. Globally, enforcement is constrained by disjointed legal frameworks, data-protection barriers and limited real-time information-sharing across borders.

The result is a growing justice gap. While the number of victims has quadrupled globally since 2012, prosecutions have only doubled and convictions remain largely unchanged. In England and Wales, fewer than 1 per cent of modern-slavery crimes recorded by police result in a charge. The gap is even more pronounced for certain forms of exploitation: forced labour, for example, now accounts for roughly two-fifths of all trafficking cases globally, yet achieves less than a fifth of convictions as it is harder to detect, prove and convict. Sexual exploitation, though a smaller share, still dominates prosecutions. The current system struggles to keep pace with the scale and complexity of the threat. This leaves the business model unchallenged, allowing traffickers to operate with impunity.

Some of the fastest-growing forms of trafficking remain largely unaddressed. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, forced cyber-scamming has surged: young professionals, lured by ads for lucrative jobs, are trafficked into scam compounds across South-East Asia. Once there, they are forced to run online fraud operations, generating hundreds of dollars a day, and are subject to violence if targets are not met. Yet these victims rarely appear in official statistics, as law enforcement in the region is not adequately engaging with the problem.

But disruption is possible. And it’s already happening.

Technology, if harnessed responsibly, can flip the equation. It can raise the risks for traffickers, cut their profits and dismantle the systems enabling exploitation at scale.

Some initiatives already show what a smarter, more strategic approach could look like. STOP THE TRAFFIK’s Traffik Analysis Hub, developed with IBM, is the world’s largest database on trafficking and modern slavery. It brings together more than 650 users globally – including banks, tech companies, NGOs and law-enforcement agencies – to pool more than 9 million trafficking data points into a secure analytics platform. The platform uses machine-learning models to uncover patterns in trafficking routes and hotspots that would be invisible to individual actors.

This intelligence has helped some key business sectors to adapt safety procedures, enabled companies to identify and remove high-risk suppliers, and provided banks with the richest set of indicators to date for identifying trafficking activity before criminal proceeds flow deeper into the legitimate financial system. In one case, intelligence from STOP THE TRAFFIK identifying a forced scam centre with around 100 victims, including bank account details of a suspected perpetrator, disrupted payments to the traffickers’ guards and degraded compound security, enabling a successful law-enforcement operation to free victims.

Promising examples of cross-sector data-sharing to disrupt exploitation are emerging – with digital tools making it faster and easier to collect and connect intelligence. In 2020, the US Customs and Border Protection agency issued a “Withhold Release Order” blocking imports from a Malaysian palm-oil giant. The investigation drew on evidence of forced labour pooled from NGOs, investigative journalists and private-sector audits. The order prompted major brands to cut ties, forcing the company to address exploitation on its plantations.

In the UK, law enforcement is beginning to adapt. In 2024, the National Crime Agency and seven major banks launched a data-analytics partnership to track organised criminal activity in real time. By combining live account data with police intelligence, the initiative has generated more than 90 law-enforcement referrals and revealed eight criminal networks that would otherwise have gone undetected. By mapping transactions and money flows, investigators are now able to intervene earlier and restrict traffickers’ access to the legitimate financial system.

These examples show how technology can disrupt trafficking – but they remain isolated. As promising as they are, such efforts are still voluntary and the exception rather than the rule. Data sharing between public and private actors is constrained by legal uncertainty and a lack of clear government direction.

The UK must now lead a joined-up, tech-led response.

The UK government has begun to respond, but not at the scale this crisis demands. The Online Safety Act introduces some obligations for platforms to remove illegal content, while the Serious and Organised Crime Strategy 2023 to 2028 outlines measures to strengthen law enforcement’s ability to investigate online crime. Yet neither sets out how platforms will be made safer by design, nor do they establish a joined-up, tech-led strategy to dismantle organised criminal networks.

In our recent paper, A New Approach to Serious and Organised Crime in the UK, we argued for a new framework that disrupts exploitation at scale. This includes a dedicated serious and organised crime (SOC) technology strategy, led by the National Crime Agency, to set out the priority technology capabilities needed to combat exploitation – including AI-powered analytics and behavioural biometrics. This would be backed by a new specialist procurement agency to accelerate cutting-edge technologies in policing and justice. The strategy would be supported by a National SOC Lab, bringing together law enforcement, government and academia, to track emerging threats, assess what works and create smarter interventions - leading to more targeted efforts to tackle exploitation.

The government should also prioritise the interoperability of UK police systems and introduce measures to improve data-sharing arrangements. This would enable secure, real-time collaboration between tech platforms, financial institutions and law enforcement. For example, the National Crime Agency’s public-private partnership should be expanded beyond the financial sector to include social-media platforms, with prototype solutions developed for each sector.

Leveraging digital identity would also make it harder for traffickers to exploit the UK’s informal labour market and operate anonymously online. Identity is a crucial counterweight to exploitation: a centrally stored digital ID could give victims a secure way to access support, replacing physical documents that are often taken away as a means of control.

These changes would help unlock the full potential of technology and steer the response away from piecemeal enforcement towards an approach that tackles the enablers of crime – not just its symptoms.

Human trafficking is a transactional crime – driven by demand, scaled through digital tools and fuelled by profit. The UK must lead by making exploitation less viable. That means using technology not simply to catch more traffickers, but to stop exploitation from happening in the first place. Success should be measured not by more arrests but by fewer victims.

Ending the business model of exploitation is possible – but it will take bold, coordinated action from government to make it happen.

Note: STOP THE TRAFFIK’s Traffik Analysis Hub is the world’s richest collection of lived-experience data on human trafficking and modern slavery, offering a range of unique data visualisations and interactive tools to equip stakeholders to take informed action.