WASHINGTON, US Secretary Antony Blinken made remarks on Monday regarding the annual release by the State Department of the 2024 trafficking in persons report.
“For more than two decades, this report has documented emerging trends, highlighted areas of progress and setback, identified effective initiatives combating human trafficking,” Blinken said.
“While trafficking is as old as humanity itself, perpetrators continue to evolve their methods.
The 2024 report examines in depth one of those emerging practices, the growing role of digital technology in trafficking, and I commend it to you for that reason, among many others,” Blinken added.
“Around the world, trafficking networks target and recruit victims online through social media, through dating apps, through gaming platforms.
Perpetrators conduct financial transactions in opaque cryptocurrencies.
They use encryption to make it harder to detect their activities or ascertain the countries where they’re operating,” Blinken said.
“And increasingly, traffi
ckers coerce their victims into participating in online scams.
Let me give you just one example of this. Traffickers used fake job listings to lure individuals away from their homes with the promise of well-paying jobs.
Instead, they were taken to an isolated guarded compound in Burma, where their phones were confiscated,” Blinken added.
“There, captives were forced to swindle people online, including American citizens, swindling them into investing in fake cryptocurrencies typically through romance scams.
One trafficking survivor, a chemical engineer from India, told a reporter that he was locked in a cell and starved until he agreed to take part in the scams.
This practice of combining human trafficking with cyber scamming is becoming more and more common,” Blinken noted.
“Now, social media can reinforce stereotypes about who can be a victim of trafficking, including along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
Like the false but widely held notion that trafficking only affects women and girls,
these misconceptions limit the ability of communities, of authorities, and even victims themselves to recognize abuse as it’s happening.
At the same time, this year’s report shows how some of these same technologies can be deployed to uncover and disrupt trafficking and can help us better hold perpetrators accountable,” the Secretary of State said.
“Civil society and the private sector are collaborating to create and apply AI enabled tools that detect trafficking operations.
Civil society groups are rolling out mobile apps to provide vulnerable individuals and groups with information about their rights as well as about the wages, the labor conditions offered by potential employers.
In Brazil, the State Department assisted a trade union that represents millions of rural coffee workers to set up a helpline on WhatsApp, where laborers can report abuses and get the support they need. Governments are integrating digital technology into their anti-trafficking efforts.
Canada, for example, worked with major fin
ancial institutions through Project Protect, a public private partnership that reviews suspicious transactions to identify the potential laundering of money from trafficking.
Trafficking is the very definition of a problem that no one nation can solve alone.
More than ever, we have to work not only with governments but along with the private sector, civil society, multinational organizations, citizens and survivors, who understand the complex challenge and how we can confront it and they know this better than anyone,” Blinken added.
Source: Kuwait News Agency