Human Trafficking

Every Statistic Is a Person

Human trafficking is not a distant crime. It happens on American farms and in American suburbs, in hotels and apartment buildings, inside trusted workplaces and on the apps your children use every day. It happens to runaways, foster youth, migrant workers, and boys who thought they were chatting with a girl their age.

This guide was built for one reason: to put accurate, current, actionable information into the hands of ordinary people. Not scare stories. Not viral rumors. Facts — drawn from federal agencies, United Nations studies, peer-reviewed research, and major anti-trafficking organizations — presented so a parent, teacher, faith leader, nurse, or neighbor can do something with them.

What you will find in these pages:

• Hard numbers on the scope of trafficking globally and in the United States between 2020 and 2024, the baseline years that show us the size of the problem we inherited.
• A clear-eyed look at the digital frontline — where almost all modern trafficking recruitment now begins.
• Warning signs and reporting tools that anyone can learn in an afternoon.
• The 2025–2026 enforcement surge — a documented turning point in federal action against traffickers, cartels, and the scam compounds trafficking Americans’ money and identities overseas.
• Watchtower, a research toolkit citizens can use to document, archive, and investigate trafficking patterns in their own communities.

One guiding principle

Every statistic in this booklet represents a human being. A twelve-year-old girl. A fifteen-year-old boy who sent one photo. A migrant worker who paid a fake recruiter. A mother looking for her daughter. Keep that in mind as you read.

This is not a book to read and forget. It is a field manual. Read it, mark it up, pass it on, act on it.

PART ONE

Understanding the Crisis

What modern slavery looks like, who it targets, and how big it has become

CHAPTER 1

The Scale of Modern Slavery

Modern slavery is the umbrella term for human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage, and every other form of coerced exploitation. The numbers are blunt.

49.6M

PEOPLE IN MODERN SLAVERY

27.6M

IN FORCED LABOR

22M

IN FORCED MARRIAGE

12.3M

CHILDREN

Source: International Labour Organization, Walk Free Foundation, and International Organization for Migration, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022, reference year 2021).

That is one in every 150 people on the planet. It is a ten-million-person increase since 2016. Compounding crises — armed conflict, economic shocks, the pandemic, climate displacement — have pushed more people into the conditions traffickers exploit.

Where modern slavery is worst

Region

People in Modern Slavery

Prevalence (per 1,000)

Asia and the Pacific

29.3 million

6.8

Africa

7.0 million

5.2

Europe and Central Asia

6.4 million

6.9

Americas

5.1 million

5.0

Arab States

1.7 million

4.8

Prevalence rates make regions comparable. Arab States rank lower in absolute numbers but have the highest forced-labor prevalence (5.3 per 1,000) due to the kafala sponsorship system.

The ten countries where it is worst

Walk Free Foundation’s Global Slavery Index ranks countries by the prevalence of modern slavery. Authoritarian regimes, conflict zones, and nations with weak labor protections dominate the top of the list.

Rank

Country

Per 1,000 People

1

North Korea

104.6

2

Eritrea

90.3

3

Mauritania

32.0

4

Saudi Arabia

21.4

5

Türkiye

15.6

6

Tajikistan

14.0

7

United Arab Emirates

13.5

8

Russia

13.0

9

Afghanistan

12.4

10

Kuwait

12.0

Source: Walk Free Foundation, Global Slavery Index 2023.

The $236 billion criminal enterprise

Trafficking is not random cruelty. It is a business. The International Labour Organization’s March 2024 report Profits and Poverty calculated that forced labor generates $236 billion per year in illegal profits — a 37 percent increase from 2014. That makes human trafficking the third most lucrative criminal enterprise on earth, behind only drugs and arms.

Where the money comes from

Forced commercial sexual exploitation: $172.6 billion (73%). Victims can be sold multiple times in a single day. Average annual profit per victim: $27,252.

Other forced labor: $63.4 billion (27%). Agriculture, construction, manufacturing, domestic work, mining. Average annual profit per victim: $3,687.

What the words mean

Modern slavery. The umbrella term. Practices where one person controls another and exploits them under threat or deception, depriving them of freedom.

Human trafficking. Recruiting, transporting, or harboring people through force, fraud, or coercion for exploitation. Differs from smuggling — trafficking victims are exploited, not just moved.

Forced labor. Work compelled under threat of punishment. Victims often receive little or no pay. Passports may be taken.

Debt bondage. A person pledges labor as security for a debt with terms so exploitative the debt is never worked off. Common in brick kilns, quarries, and textile factories across South Asia.

Forced marriage. Marriage without consent, in which a person cannot leave. Often involves domestic servitude and sexual abuse.

Forced criminality. Victims compelled to commit crimes for their trafficker — running scams, selling drugs, stealing. Now 8 percent of all detected trafficking, up from 1 percent in 2016.

The big picture

About one in three detected trafficking victims worldwide is a child — up 31 percent from 2019. Women and girls make up 61 percent of identified victims. Forced labor trafficking has surged 47 percent since 2019 and now surpasses sex trafficking in detected cases.

Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 (reference year 2022).

CHAPTER 2

Trafficking in America: The 2020–2024 Baseline

The United States has lower prevalence than conflict zones or authoritarian states, but it plays a massive role in the global trafficking economy — as destination, consumer, and waypoint. Here is what the federal data and the National Human Trafficking Hotline showed during the 2020–2024 baseline period.

The hotline years, 2020–2024

The National Human Trafficking Hotline received tens of thousands of substantive contacts every year from 2020 through 2024. Because trafficking is almost always hidden, these numbers are a floor, not a ceiling.

Year

Substantive Signals

Situations Identified

Victims Identified

2020

~51,000

10,359

16,658

2021

50,123

10,360

16,554

2022

53,334

10,360

22,104

2023

~48,000

~9,800

~20,000

2024

32,309

11,999

21,865

Sources: Polaris Project annual hotline reports and 2024 summary (June 2025). Note: Polaris ceased operating the national hotline during 2025; a successor operator has continued the service.

What the 2024 numbers tell us

Sex trafficking situations: 6,647. Labor trafficking: 2,220. Combined sex and labor: 1,360.

Victims: 8,233 adults, 2,666 minors. 8,359 female and 1,972 male (where known).

Direct contacts from victims and survivors: 8,024. A record that shows people in exploitation increasingly know how to ask for help.

Cumulative since the hotline launched in 2007

463,109 substantive signals received.

112,822 trafficking cases identified.

218,568 victims identified.

The venues where U.S. trafficking happens

Hotline data from the 2020–2024 period consistently identified the same top venues. Sex trafficking is most often tied to private residences, unlicensed massage businesses, and hotels — including major chains that have repeatedly been sued in civil trafficking cases.

Most reported sex trafficking venues

• Residence-based — private homes used for commercial sex.
• Illicit massage and spa businesses — an industry Polaris estimates is worth over $2 billion annually in the U.S.
• Hotels and motels — repeat venue across every major metro.
• Online advertisements — even after the Backpage seizure, dozens of replacement sites emerged.
• Outdoor and street-based prostitution.
• Strip clubs and escort services.

Most reported labor trafficking venues

• Domestic work — roughly one in four labor trafficking cases involves a domestic worker, often a foreign national isolated in a private home.
• Restaurants and food service.
• Construction.
• Agriculture — often H-2A visa holders whose status is tied to a single employer.
• Food processing and meatpacking.
• Landscaping, traveling sales crews, beauty services.

The states where it shows up most

California, Texas, Florida, and New York consistently lead the nation in reported trafficking cases — partly because of population, partly because of the major international airports, ports, and migration corridors that run through them, and partly because those states have the best-developed victim-service networks and therefore the most reporting.

Why reporting varies so much by state

A state with more reports is not necessarily a state with more trafficking. It may simply have better training, stronger hotlines, and more service providers who recognize trafficking when they see it. States with few reports often have more hidden trafficking, not less.

America’s role in the global trade

The United States is the world’s largest importer of goods made with forced labor. Independent analysis by the Walk Free Foundation found that G20 countries import roughly $468 billion in at-risk products every year. The U.S. share of that: $51.1 billion, more than any other G20 nation.

Top at-risk U.S. imports

• Electronics from East and Southeast Asia.
• Fast-fashion garments and textiles.
• Solar panels and polysilicon from Xinjiang.
• Seafood from Thai and Southeast Asian fishing vessels.
• Cotton, cocoa, coffee.
• Cobalt for lithium-ion batteries — mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo by children and adults in unsafe artisanal mines.

Every smartphone in your pocket may contain components touched by forced labor at multiple points in its supply chain. The question is what we, as consumers and voters, do about that.

CHAPTER 3

Forms of Exploitation

Trafficking is not one crime. It is a family of related crimes, each with its own patterns, red flags, and survivor experience. Knowing the differences helps you spot what is actually happening in front of you.

Sex trafficking

Sex trafficking involves using force, fraud, or coercion to compel someone into commercial sex acts. If the victim is under 18, no force or coercion needs to be proved — any commercial sexual exploitation of a minor is trafficking.

Scale: About 6.3 million people globally are in forced commercial sexual exploitation, according to the ILO. That small share of victims generates roughly three-quarters of all trafficking profits — $172.6 billion a year.

How it happens in the U.S.

• Romeo or boyfriend pimps — predators who pose as romantic partners to groom vulnerable youth, most often through Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, then force them into commercial sex.
• Family-facilitated trafficking — a relative sells access to a child. Tragic and common in cases involving very young victims.
• Gang-controlled trafficking — MS-13 and Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been indicted in large sex trafficking conspiracies.
• Online-facilitated trafficking — recruitment on social media, advertising on classified sites, sale through encrypted messaging apps.

What survivors carry with them

Polaris Project’s National Survivor Study of 457 survivors found that 43 percent earn $25,000 or less per year after their trafficking ends, 75 percent need mental-health services, and 40 percent carry criminal records for offenses committed while under trafficker control — arrests for prostitution, drug possession, theft. Clearing those records is one of the most important pieces of recovery.

Labor trafficking

Labor trafficking is now 42 percent of detected trafficking worldwide — a 47 percent surge since 2019. Victims are forced to work through debt bondage, document confiscation, threats, or violence.

Where it happens in America

• Agriculture. Operation Blooming Onion in south Georgia exposed the largest agricultural trafficking prosecution in U.S. history: 24 people indicted for exploiting more than 71,000 workers brought on H-2A visas, forced to dig onions with bare hands for 20 cents a bucket under armed guard. At least two workers died.
• Food processing. A federal investigation into Packers Sanitation Services found more than 100 children ages 13 to 17 working overnight cleaning shifts at 13 meatpacking plants, some with chemical burns.
• Domestic work. Migrant nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers are isolated inside private homes, often with passports taken and wages withheld.
• Construction and landscaping. Debt bondage, wage theft, threats of deportation.

The visa trap

Seventy-two percent of labor trafficking victims identified via the National Hotline from 2018–2020 held temporary work visas. H-2A agricultural worker visas grew from about 225,000 in 2017 to over 370,000 in 2023. When your legal status is tied to a single employer, leaving an abusive workplace means losing the right to stay in the country.

Forced criminality — the newest front

This is the fastest-growing form of trafficking. UN data shows it has jumped from 1 percent of detected cases in 2016 to 8 percent today. Victims are forced to commit crimes for their traffickers: running online scams, stealing, selling drugs. They can end up facing prosecution for crimes they were compelled to commit.

The largest example is the Southeast Asian scam compounds — an industry built on trafficking hundreds of thousands of people into Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos to defraud Americans and others out of billions. Chapter 8 covers it in detail.

Forced marriage

Roughly 22 million people worldwide live in forced marriages. Most are women and girls. Forced marriage often means domestic servitude, sexual abuse, and the near-total loss of personal freedom.

Country

Girls Married Before 18

Girls Married Before 15

Niger

76%

28%

Bangladesh

51%

16%

Yemen

32%

No minimum age law

Afghanistan

28–35%

Data limited under Taliban rule

Source: UNICEF Child Marriage Data.

CHAPTER 4

Who Is Vulnerable — And Who Traffics

Traffickers look for vulnerability. They do not care about age, gender, race, nationality, or economic class — they care about whoever is easiest to control. But patterns exist, and knowing them helps you protect the people you love and recognize strangers in trouble.

The profile of vulnerability

Common risk factors traffickers look for:

• Unstable housing or homelessness.
• A history of abuse, neglect, or family violence.
• Involvement with foster care or the child welfare system.
• Isolation, loneliness, low self-worth.
• Financial desperation.
• Recent immigration or uncertain legal status.
• Substance use, especially opioids.
• LGBTQ+ youth rejected by family.
• Any child who feels unseen at home.

The foster-care pipeline

The numbers are consistent across federal sources. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children estimates that 1 in 6 endangered runaways reported missing in 2024 were likely victims of child sex trafficking — and nearly half had run from foster care or group homes. A 2013 FBI nationwide raid found that 60 percent of recovered child sex trafficking victims had been in foster care or group homes.

Roughly 390,000 children are in U.S. foster care at any given time. About 20,000 age out each year at 18, often with no family, no housing, no job skills, and no safety net. Traffickers know exactly where to look.

Who the traffickers are

Forget the stranger-in-a-white-van image. Most traffickers look nothing like what pop culture sells.

The people actually doing this

• Family members. In the Philippines, the landmark 2023 Scale of Harm study found that 83 percent of traffickers producing online child sexual exploitation material were family members. In the United States, parents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, and boyfriends-of-parents appear constantly in prosecution records.
• Romantic partners. Boyfriend pimps are the most common domestic-minor sex-trafficking profile. They groom, they isolate, they threaten. Victims often believe they are in love.
• Employers and labor contractors. For labor trafficking, it is the farm manager, the cleaning-service owner, the nail-salon owner, the house sponsor.
• Organized crime. Cartels, gangs, and transnational syndicates — Tren de Aragua, MS-13, Nigerian Yahoo Boys, Chinese triads running scam compounds.
• Online predators operating at scale. A single offender can target hundreds of victims at once through social media.

How they recruit

Recruitment almost never looks like kidnapping. It looks like attention, a job offer, a way out.

Five patterns to recognize

• The job that is too good. A recruiter shows up offering high wages for “simple” work. Modeling. Customer service. Restaurant jobs abroad. Workers pay recruitment fees, sometimes thousands of dollars. On arrival the work is different, the wages lower, the passport confiscated.
• The debt trap. Workers borrow to pay a recruiter’s fee. Once abroad, inflated charges for food, housing, and transport keep the debt growing. Leaving means theft.
• The boyfriend, the girlfriend. A teen meets someone online who is older, attentive, showers them with gifts. Weeks or months of grooming isolate them from family. Then the coercion starts.
• The modeling or influencer opportunity. Young women approached on Instagram or TikTok by a “talent scout.” Photo shoots that escalate. Videos sold online without consent.
• The family offer. In some cases a parent, aunt, or uncle is the trafficker. The abuse is normalized as help or as family duty. This is especially common in online sexual exploitation of children and in some child-marriage practices.

Social media is now the #1 recruitment venue for trafficking

Thorn’s research found that 55 percent of domestic minor sex trafficking survivors since 2015 first met their trafficker online. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat top the list of platforms where initial contact happened. A 2021 study of federal prosecutions found that 41 percent of victims were recruited on social media, up from 30 percent during the previous decade.

PART TWO

The Digital Danger Zone

Where recruitment, abuse, and exploitation now begin

CHAPTER 5

How Traffickers Find Children Online

The modern predator does not hang around playgrounds. They open the same apps your child uses and scroll until they find a profile that looks lonely. They send one message. If it gets answered, they move to DMs. If that works, they move to Snapchat or WhatsApp. If that works, the grooming begins.

This is not a small-scale problem. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children runs the federal CyberTipline that every U.S. tech platform is legally required to report to. The numbers explain what parents are up against.

Year

CyberTipline Reports

Files Reviewed

2020

21.7 million

—

2021

29.4 million

—

2022

32.0+ million

—

2023

36.2 million

105.6 million

2024

20.5 million

62.9 million

Source: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, CyberTipline annual data. The 2024 drop is primarily attributable to Meta rolling out default end-to-end encryption on Messenger and Instagram DMs in late 2023 — which turned off much of the automated detection that drove prior years’ reporting totals.

The platforms where it happens

In 2024, eight platforms produced about 81 percent of all CyberTipline reports. The top reporters are Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Amazon AI Services, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, X, Grindr, and Roblox. That is not a complete list of where children are harmed — it is a list of platforms that actually report. Silence from a platform does not mean safety.

Online enticement: up nearly 200 percent

Online enticement — predators contacting children to coerce sexual content, meetings, or money — exploded as platforms expanded and federal reporting law tightened.

44,000

ENTICEMENT REPORTS, 2021

546,000+

ENTICEMENT REPORTS, 2024

Source: NCMEC CyberTipline 2024 Annual Report. The surge reflects both real growth in predatory contact and the REPORT Act of 2024, which expanded mandatory reporting.

How grooming actually works

Law enforcement and researchers describe grooming as a predictable sequence. Learn it once; you will spot it fast.

• Targeting. Predators scan for vulnerability signals — posts about loneliness, family conflict, mental health struggles, body image issues. A kid venting online is a target.
• Trust-building. Flattery, validation, gifts, shared secrets. “You’re so mature.” “Your parents just don’t get you.”
• Isolation. Moving to private messaging. Encouraging the child to keep the friendship secret. Slowly distancing them from real-world friends.
• Desensitization. Sharing mildly sexual jokes, memes, or photos. Escalating slowly. Each small step normalizes the next.
• The ask. A photo. A video. A meeting. Often framed as “if you really loved me.”
• Control. Once the predator has compromising content, blackmail begins. This is the pivot into sextortion or trafficking.

Red flags parents should know

• A new “online friend” your child will not talk about.
• Secrecy about phone or computer use; hiding screens when you walk in.
• Multiple social media accounts, including ones you do not know about.
• Unexplained gifts, money, gift cards, or cryptocurrency.
• Sudden mood changes: withdrawal, anxiety, anger.
• Late-night messaging activity.
• Knowledge of sexual content inappropriate for their age.
• Talk of traveling, meeting up, or “going somewhere” with a friend you have never met.

The conversation to have

The research is consistent: children whose parents talk to them openly about online safety — without shaming — are dramatically less likely to be victimized, and dramatically more likely to come forward if something does happen. The message that matters most is: if anything makes you uncomfortable online, no matter what you did or sent, you can tell me. You will not be in trouble. We will handle it together.

CHAPTER 6

The Sextortion Crisis

Financial sextortion is the fastest-growing online crime targeting American teenagers. It has killed at least 36 young people in the United States since 2021. The victims are overwhelmingly boys.

54,000+

SEXTORTION COMPLAINTS, 2024

91%

OF VICTIMS ARE MALE

14–17

MOST COMMON VICTIM AGE

36+

TEEN SUICIDES SINCE 2021

Sources: FBI Internet Crime Report 2024; NCMEC CyberTipline; FinCEN Notice on Financially Motivated Sextortion (September 2025). International totals including U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia bring linked suicide counts higher.

How it works

Sextortion rings — most operating out of Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire — run industrial-scale operations. A teenage boy matches with what appears to be a girl his age on Instagram or Snapchat. Flirtation escalates quickly. She sends a photo. He sends one back. Within minutes, everything changes.

Screenshots of his contact list appear. His photo is pasted onto threatening images. A list of his followers, his friends, his family, and sometimes his school is sent back to him. The demand: pay now, or we send this to everyone you know.

The average time between first contact and the first extortion demand in sextortion cases is now under two hours. Some cases escalate to suicide within hours of the first demand.

— FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center

What breaks parents

The victims are most often the kids parents would never expect. High-achieving students. Athletes. Boys with no mental-health history and no prior risk factors. A single mistake, made in a panic moment, became a trap that felt inescapable. Documented victims include Jordan DeMay (17, Michigan), Ryan Last (17, California), Gavin Guffey (17, South Carolina), and Jake George — each died within hours of their first extortion demand.

The federal response, 2024–2025

In April 2025, the FBI launched Operation Artemis, deploying agents to Nigeria. Twenty-two Nigerians were arrested in coordinated raids, roughly half linked to victim suicides. Operation Level Up, also run by the FBI, had by early 2025 identified more than 8,100 sextortion victims, notified them, and intervened in at least 80 suicide situations. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law on May 19, 2025, requires online platforms to remove reported non-consensual intimate imagery — including AI-generated deepfakes — within 48 hours.

If this happens to your child — the three things to do right now

• Do not pay. Paying does not stop the blackmail. It often increases demands. The extortionists will escalate regardless.
• Do not delete the conversation. Screenshot everything — usernames, messages, payment demands, cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Evidence is what enables arrests.
• Report immediately. Call the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or report at tips.fbi.gov. File with the NCMEC CyberTipline at CyberTipline.org. For minors, NCMEC’s Take It Down service at TakeItDown.NCMEC.org can help remove images from participating platforms.

The most important message to a child in this moment: you are not in trouble. You did not ruin your life. Predators choose you because they know shame keeps kids silent. The shame belongs to them, not to you.

CHAPTER 7

AI-Generated Abuse and Deepfakes

In 2023, generative-AI tools became accessible to anyone with a phone. By 2024, predators had noticed. The consequences are now visible at scale.

4,700

AI CSAM REPORTS, 2023

67,000

AI CSAM REPORTS, 2024

Sources: NCMEC CyberTipline 2024 Annual Report — a 1,325 percent increase in a single year. Independent verification from the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation confirmed that AI-generated child sexual abuse videos jumped from 13 confirmed cases in 2024 to 3,443 in 2025 — a 260-fold increase.

The three AI threats parents need to know

1. AI-generated CSAM

Predators use open-source image-generation models to create photorealistic abuse imagery of children who may or may not exist. Traditional detection, which matches new uploads against a database of known illegal images, does not catch this. Every AI-generated image is unique. The Internet Watch Foundation’s 2025 report found that 65 percent of AI-generated CSAM videos depict the most severe abuse categories.

2. Nudify apps

So-called “nudify” or “undress” apps take a regular photo of a clothed person and generate a realistic nude version. An April 2026 investigation by the Tech Transparency Project found 483 million lifetime downloads of nudify apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play, and $122 million in lifetime revenue. Thirty-one of those apps were rated suitable for minors. These apps have been used in schools across at least 28 countries to attack specific students.

3. Deepfake sextortion

Sextortion rings no longer need the victim to send a photo. They can fabricate one. A kid’s Instagram profile photo and a deepfake tool is all it takes to generate a convincing fake nude, which then becomes the blackmail leverage. The TAKE IT DOWN Act specifically covers these “digital forgeries.”

What the TAKE IT DOWN Act requires

Signed May 19, 2025. Platforms must remove reported non-consensual intimate imagery — real or AI-generated — within 48 hours of a valid notice. Criminal penalties: up to two years in federal prison for offenses against adults; up to three years for offenses against minors. Covered platforms must have notice-and-removal procedures in place by May 19, 2026. The first federal conviction under the Act was obtained in April 2026.

What to tell your kids

The brutal truth is that a deepfake does not require a real photo of them to exist. Your face is on the internet somewhere — in a yearbook, a sports roster, a tagged post from a relative’s account. What protects kids is not invisibility; it is knowing what to do when it happens. If a classmate shares a fake, do not retaliate, do not try to handle it alone, and do not believe it will blow over. Report it to a trusted adult immediately. Under federal law, the image has to come down within 48 hours of a valid notice.

CHAPTER 8

Scam Compounds and Forced Criminality

If you have received a WhatsApp message from a number you do not know — a wrong-number that slowly becomes a friendly chat about crypto investments — there is a good chance the person on the other end is a trafficking victim being beaten if they do not scam you.

This is one of the largest human trafficking phenomena in modern history. Since 2020, an estimated 200,000 or more people have been trafficked into fortified compounds across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, forced to run online fraud operations for organized crime syndicates. They are recruited on social media with fake IT or customer-service job listings, transported across borders, stripped of their passports, and held behind barbed wire. They are beaten, tortured, and sometimes sold between compounds when they fail to meet quotas.

200K+

PEOPLE IN SE ASIAN COMPOUNDS

56+

SOURCE COUNTRIES

$12.5B

U.S. FRAUD LOSSES, 2024

$5.7B

INVESTMENT-SCAM LOSSES

Sources: UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2023, 2026); FBI Internet Crime Report 2024; FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book (March 2025).

“Pig butchering”: the scam you have almost certainly received

The most common scam type is called pig butchering — a literal translation of the Chinese term used inside the compounds. It works like this: the wrong-number text. The friendly chat. Shared photos of a beautiful life. A mention of successful cryptocurrency investments. An introduction to a platform that looks professional. Small profits, withdrawable. Encouragement to invest more. Then the account shows huge returns — and when the victim tries to withdraw, fees appear, taxes appear, the money vanishes. The victim was the pig, being fattened for slaughter.

Americans lose tens of billions of dollars to these scams each year. Older Americans are disproportionately targeted: those 60 and over lost nearly $5 billion to internet-enabled fraud in 2024 alone.

If you get a text from a number you do not recognize

Do not reply, even to say “wrong number.” Any response tells the operation that the number is real and active. Block it. If the message is persistent or includes an investment pitch, report it to the FBI at IC3.gov. Warn older relatives — they are the primary targets, and they often do not know this category of scam exists.

PART THREE

Recognizing and Reporting

What to look for, how to report, and how to protect your family

CHAPTER 9

Warning Signs in Your Community

Trafficking victims walk past ordinary citizens every single day — on construction sites, inside nail salons and massage parlors, serving food at restaurants, working in hotels. They are almost never identified. Not because they are invisible, but because nobody around them has been taught what to look for.

You do not need a badge, a degree, or any special training to report a reasonable suspicion. Every person listed in this chapter as a victim was, at some point, seen by someone who did not know the signs. You can be the one who does.

Labor trafficking — what to notice

Where the worker lives and moves

• Appears to live at the worksite or be transported to and from the site in groups.
• Housed in overcrowded conditions controlled by the employer.
• Not free to come and go.
• Does not possess their own identification documents.

How they behave

• Appears malnourished, exhausted, fearful, or anxious.
• Cannot speak freely or make eye contact; an employer or third party answers for them.
• Rehearsed or scripted answers to basic questions.
• Unpaid, paid very little, or paid only through tips.

What they say

• Reports owing a large debt to an employer or recruiter.
• Describes excessive work hours with no days off.
• Says a boss is holding their documents “for safekeeping.”
• Has been promised one job but given a different one.

Sex trafficking — what to notice

Relationships and control

• A noticeably older “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” who controls when the person can speak or eat.
• The person is not allowed to answer for themselves.
• Unexplained gifts, cash, or multiple hotel room keys.
• Tattoos or branding indicating ownership: a name, “daddy,” a barcode, dollar signs.

Physical and behavioral signs

• Signs of physical abuse: bruises, burns, missing teeth.
• Dressed inappropriately for age or weather.
• Appears to follow a memorized script about relationships, travel, or work.
• Uses trafficking terminology: “the life,” “the game,” “track,” “trick,” “daddy,” “QOS.”

Red flags involving minors

• Unexplained absences from school.
• Running away repeatedly.
• Sudden changes in behavior, appearance, friends.
• Possessing expensive items without a clear source — new phone, designer clothes, cash.
• Multiple phones.
• Mentions of traveling to other cities without family.
• “Couch surfing” or homelessness.

Questions to ask yourself before reporting

You do not need to be sure. The hotline asks a few basic questions; trained operators determine whether the situation may be trafficking. You just need enough to make the call.

• Does this person seem free to leave?
• Do they seem to have control over their money and documents?
• Did someone else answer for them or coach their responses?
• Do the conditions match what the person or employer is describing?

Where to look without looking weird

The highest-trafficking venues are the ones you already encounter: hotels, massage businesses, nail salons, agricultural operations, cleaning crews, construction sites. If you work in hospitality, transportation, healthcare, or retail — or spend time in those settings as a customer — you are already on the front line.

CHAPTER 10

How to Report — And What Happens Next

Reporting is simple. You do not have to be certain, you do not have to give your name, and the operators are trained to handle ambiguity. Here is every resource worth knowing, in plain language.

The primary hotlines

NATIONAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING HOTLINE

Phone: 1-888-373-7888

Text: “BEFREE” to 233733

Chat: humantraffickinghotline.org

24/7 • 200+ languages • confidential • not law enforcement — you do not have to give your name.

Use for: suspected trafficking of any kind, to find survivor services, for tips anonymous or not.

NCMEC CYBERTIPLINE

Phone: 1-800-843-5678

Online: CyberTipline.org

Use for: online exploitation of children, child sexual abuse material, online enticement, child sex trafficking, sextortion, misleading domain names.

For minors needing intimate imagery removed from participating platforms: TakeItDown.NCMEC.org.

FBI

Phone: 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324)

Online: tips.fbi.gov

For internet crime, sextortion, crypto scams: IC3.gov

Use for: sex trafficking, child exploitation, sextortion, federal crimes, organized trafficking operations.

HOMELAND SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS (HSI)

Phone: 1-866-347-2423

Online: ice.gov/tipline

Use for: labor trafficking, immigration-related trafficking, international trafficking, smuggling.

EMERGENCIES

Someone is in immediate danger: dial 911.

Do not attempt to confront a trafficker, rescue a suspected victim yourself, or investigate on your own. Trained professionals have protocols that keep victims alive. A well-meaning civilian intervention can put a victim in worse danger.

What to report, even if you are not sure

Operators on the trafficking hotline are trained to handle vague information. Give them what you have. Helpful details, in rough priority order:

• Your concern — what you saw, heard, or suspected, in your own words.
• Where it happened — address, business name, intersection.
• Physical descriptions of the people involved.
• Vehicles and license plates if relevant.
• Times, dates, and patterns — “There are always three vans at the side door at 6 a.m.”
• Any phone numbers, websites, or social media handles you saw advertised.

What happens after you call

The hotline operator listens, asks basic questions, and determines whether the situation may be trafficking. If it may be, they route the tip to law enforcement that has jurisdiction — local police, state task force, the FBI, HSI, or a specialized unit. They also connect victims to service providers if the caller is a victim or if a victim can be reached.

You do not get a case update — that is for the safety of victims and investigations. But every tip adds to a pattern. A single call sometimes triggers a rescue; more often, your call joins three others that together build a case.

If you are the one being trafficked

Read this if you need help right now

Call or text the National Human Trafficking Hotline. You do not need your own phone — a friend’s, a librarian’s, a hospital receptionist’s all work. You will not be arrested for being a trafficking victim. You do not need legal immigration status to get help. You can stay anonymous.

If you are a minor being exploited online, Take It Down can remove images from major platforms: TakeItDown.NCMEC.org.

If your life is in danger, call 911 and say the words “I am being trafficked.”

CHAPTER 11

Protecting Your Family

Most of what keeps a family safe costs nothing. Conversation, attention, a handful of device settings, and the standing agreement that your child can come to you when something goes wrong — no matter what they did.

Conversations that matter

Age-appropriate is the key. For younger children, focus on body autonomy, trusted adults, and the right to say no. For preteens, introduce online safety, grooming patterns, and what healthy friendships look like. For teenagers, be direct about sextortion, AI deepfakes, and the fact that anyone who pressures them for an image is not a friend.

The one sentence that protects children

If anything happens online that makes you uncomfortable — no matter what you did, no matter what you sent — you can come to me. You will not be in trouble. We will handle it together.

— Say this every few months. Mean it.

Device and account basics

• Keep privacy settings maxed out on social apps. Review them every school break; platforms change defaults.
• Accounts should be private. Real names, schools, and sports teams do not belong in public bios.
• Two-factor authentication on every account your child uses.
• Location sharing off by default on apps that do not need it. On for family apps that do.
• Delete apps your child is not actively using.
• Know which apps your child uses. Make a family rule: no new accounts without telling a parent.

Warning signs at home

• Sudden secretive behavior around devices.
• A new online friend your child will not talk about.
• Unexplained money, gift cards, or cryptocurrency.
• Withdrawal from family activities or trusted friendships.
• Signs of depression or anxiety that appear suddenly.
• Mention of meeting up with someone the family has never met.

What to do if something has gone wrong

• Stay calm. Panic shuts kids down.
• Do not take their phone and disappear with it. You need them cooperating.
• Screenshot everything. Usernames, messages, demands, cryptocurrency wallets.
• Do not pay, if the situation involves blackmail.
• Report: NCMEC CyberTipline (CyberTipline.org), FBI (tips.fbi.gov or IC3.gov), and the National Human Trafficking Hotline for non-internet cases.
• Get your child connected with a trauma-informed counselor. A pediatrician can refer; Polaris Project’s referral network and HEAL Trafficking’s provider directory can find specialists.

PART FOUR

Fighting Back: 2020–2026

The baseline we inherited — and the turning point that followed

CHAPTER 12

Landmark Prosecutions, 2020–2024

The years 2020 through 2024 produced some of the most important trafficking prosecutions in American history — cases that set legal precedent, dismantled networks, and demonstrated that wealth and fame are not protection. Three of them every parent should know by name, because they teach the same lesson: the people most dangerous to children are rarely the stranger in the van. They are the men — and sometimes women — whose status, access, and money let them build trafficking operations hidden behind celebrity, philanthropy, and glamour.

Jeffrey Epstein — the network that shaped the modern playbook

Jeffrey Epstein operated a child sex trafficking network for more than two decades. From the 1990s through 2019 he recruited, groomed, and abused underage girls — most of them between the ages of 14 and 17 — across his properties in New York, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Girls were identified by recruiters, paid to bring friends, flown on private aircraft, and passed through a circle of powerful men that Epstein cultivated over a lifetime.

Epstein was first prosecuted in Florida in 2007. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to a pair of state solicitation charges under a non-prosecution agreement widely criticized for its leniency. He served roughly 13 months in a county jail program that allowed him to leave for work most days. In July 2019, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged him with sex trafficking of minors. He died in federal custody in August 2019 before trial. The medical examiner ruled suicide.

The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program has distributed more than $121 million to 138 claimants. Civil litigation continues to produce document releases, flight logs, and deposition transcripts. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed in late 2025, required a partial release of remaining federal records in December 2025. More is expected.

What Epstein teaches parents

Predators with money build networks, not one-off situations. They buy silence with legal settlements and NDAs. They recruit through other victims — “come work for me, bring your friend” — because a peer is less threatening than a stranger. They involve trusted adults, often in institutional positions, who look past warning signs because the money, the access, or the career opportunity is too good to question. Any “opportunity” that requires your teenager to be alone with an adult in a private home, on private property, or on private aircraft is not an opportunity. It is the template.

Ghislaine Maxwell — why it takes two

Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 on five counts, including sex trafficking of a minor and conspiracy. Sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years in federal prison and a $750,000 fine. Her conviction was upheld on appeal by the Second Circuit in September 2024; the Supreme Court declined to review the case in October 2025.

Maxwell’s role inside the Epstein operation was specific and chilling. She approached girls in malls, spas, and on the street. She made them feel safe. She offered jobs — massage work, modeling — that sounded legitimate because a woman was offering them. She normalized what came next. Witnesses at trial described her as indispensable to the trafficking: Epstein was the money and the access; Maxwell was the disarm.

What Maxwell teaches parents

A woman in the room does not mean safety. Female recruiters are a standard feature of trafficking operations precisely because our instincts relax around them. Teach your children — girls especially — that “I’m just like you” is not a credential. That a flattering older woman offering introductions, photo shoots, or jobs in another city is a pattern investigators know well. That an adult of any gender who wants your teenager alone, in a private setting, to do something you haven’t pre-approved is a risk. Full stop.

Sean “Diddy” Combs — the industry case

Sean Combs was indicted in September 2024 by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York after a federal investigation that included the raids of his Los Angeles and Miami homes. The indictment alleged more than two decades of organized abuse. The trial began in May 2025. In July 2025 Combs was convicted of federal prostitution-related transportation offenses under the Mann Act. In October 2025 he was sentenced to 50 months in federal prison and a $500,000 fine and is serving his sentence at FCI Fort Dix.

The case record produced in court and in parallel civil litigation documents a decades-long pattern the public had not seen. A 2016 hotel surveillance video, released publicly during the investigation, showed Combs attacking his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in a hallway. Ventura filed a civil lawsuit in November 2023 alleging years of coercion, physical abuse, and forced participation in sex acts with male escorts at events Combs and his staff referred to as “freak-offs.” The lawsuit was settled the following day. Dozens of additional civil suits followed through 2024 and 2025 from other women and men, including allegations involving minors.

Testimony and evidence described a template many entertainment-industry survivors describe: young people — artists, dancers, assistants — recruited into orbit with the promise of career access; isolation from family and existing support; drug use normalized; NDAs deployed to silence anyone who tried to leave; physical violence used to enforce compliance. The Mann Act conviction covers the federal crime of transporting people across state lines for prostitution. It does not capture the full alleged pattern, but it is a felony conviction and it removed Combs from society for more than four years.

What the Combs case teaches parents

Predators in the entertainment industry use the same toolkit: the career “in,” the after-party invitation, the hotel room, the NDA. They target young adults because young adults are legally consenting and therefore easier to defend in court. But grooming works the same on an aspiring nineteen-year-old as on a fifteen-year-old. If a child of any age is telling you about access to powerful men in music, film, fashion, or sports through parties, private flights, or “meetings” in hotel rooms, the right answer is always no — no matter how closed the door on the opportunity. Teach your kids that a legitimate career in any industry does not begin with an NDA or a closed door.

How I want this fixed

These cases prove that prosecution is possible. They also prove that prosecution is usually too late. The victims had already been abused for years, sometimes decades, before anyone with authority listened. That is what has to change.

• Ban non-disclosure agreements that cover sexual abuse or trafficking. Several states have passed laws voiding NDAs used to silence victims of sexual assault. Every state should. Federal law should match.
• Mandatory mandated-reporter training in entertainment, sports, and modeling. Agents, managers, label staff, casting directors, and coaches who work with young people should be mandatory reporters on the same footing as teachers and pediatricians.
• Federal felony penalties for adults who transport minors for “opportunity” access. Close the loophole where an adult can fly a minor to a hotel room for an “audition” or “meeting” without a parent present and claim it was consensual career development.
• Permanent federal victim-compensation fund. Modeled on the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, paid for by forfeited trafficker assets, available to survivors regardless of when the abuse occurred.
• Lifetime registration for convicted traffickers. Currently uneven across states. Should be federal and automatic on any conviction involving minors.
• Full release of the Epstein files. Every flight log. Every name. Every victim record that survivors consent to release. The Transparency Act was a start. Finish it.

Other landmark cases of 2020–2024

Keith Raniere and NXIVM

Convicted in 2019 and sentenced in 2020 to 120 years. Raniere ran a purported self-improvement organization that was in fact a sex trafficking operation, branding women as his property. Co-defendants included Seagram’s heiress Clare Bronfman (81 months) and actress Allison Mack (3 years). The NXIVM prosecution pioneered the legal concepts of “trauma-coerced attachment” and “coercive control” — frameworks that have been used in every major trafficking case since.

R. Kelly — decades of impunity ended

Convicted in Brooklyn federal court in 2021 and sentenced in June 2022 to 30 years for racketeering and sex trafficking, using fame and a network of employees to recruit and control victims over 25 years. A separate Chicago conviction in 2023 added 20 more years for child-exploitation-material production. Combined, roughly 31 years. The case demonstrated that documented patterns of abuse, consistent victim testimony, and racketeering statutes can overcome even a generation of industry protection.

Michael Pratt and GirlsDoPorn

Pratt fled to New Zealand before trial; captured and extradited. Convicted 2024, sentenced June 2025 to 27 years in federal prison. His operation deceived more than 100 young women through false modeling advertisements, telling them the videos would only appear on overseas DVDs. The videos were instead distributed online and collectively viewed more than one billion times. At least 15 women who appeared in the videos have since died by suicide or other causes. The case established that fraudulent recruitment satisfies the “fraud” element of federal sex trafficking law, independent of physical force.

Operation Blooming Onion — the largest labor trafficking case in U.S. history

Indicted November 2021 in the Southern District of Georgia. Twenty-four defendants. Fifty-four federal counts. The scheme exploited more than 71,000 workers brought on H-2A agricultural visas, forcing them to dig onions with their bare hands for 20 cents per bucket, under armed guard in fenced work camps. Passports confiscated. Workers threatened with rape, kidnapping, murder. At least two workers died from mistreatment.

Ringleader Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. was sentenced to 30 years. The case continues to produce sentencings of additional defendants through 2025. It exposed structural vulnerabilities in the H-2A program that tie a worker’s legal status to a single employer, creating inherent coercion.

Backpage.com — $215 million victim compensation fund

Backpage, described by federal prosecutors as “the internet’s leading forum for prostitution ads,” was seized in April 2018 and prosecuted through 2023. Co-founder Michael Lacey received a five-year sentence and a $3 million fine; CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty and cooperated. A $215 million victim compensation fund was established, with claims open through March 2026. Internal documents showed employees knew ads involved trafficking victims, including minors, but continued operations for profit.

Packers Sanitation Services and the child-labor scandal

Department of Labor investigation concluded in 2023: more than 100 children ages 13 to 17 found working overnight cleaning shifts at 13 meatpacking facilities operated by Packers Sanitation Services. Hazardous machinery. Chemical burns. A $1.5 million civil penalty was widely criticized as insufficient given the scope of the violations. The case drove bipartisan demand for tougher child-labor enforcement, including against the staffing companies that supply minors to dangerous jobs.

Operation Cross Country — the FBI’s annual sweep

FBI Operation Cross Country has run since 2003 and by the end of the 2020–2024 period had recovered more than 6,500 children cumulatively. The 2023 sweep (OCC XIII) recovered 59 minor victims, located 59 additional missing children, and identified 126 child-exploitation suspects nationwide — one of the larger single-operation totals in the program’s history.

What 2020–2024 taught us

Fame does not protect traffickers. Wealth does not protect them. Racketeering statutes and pattern evidence work. Victim testimony, trauma-informed prosecution, and civil liability — especially against hotels and online platforms that profited from trafficking — are now mature tools. But enforcement was uneven, labor trafficking received lighter sentences than sex trafficking for equivalent exploitation, and entire sectors remained virtually untouched.

CHAPTER 13

The 2025–2026 Enforcement Surge

Beginning January 2025, the federal government launched the most concentrated anti-trafficking enforcement push in a generation. Some of these actions are routine — annual operations continuing prior years’ work. Others are categorically new. Some are controversial, with court challenges. What follows is a factual inventory of what happened between January 2025 and April 2026.

Cartels designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations

On February 20, 2025, the State Department designated eight major cartels and transnational gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists:

• Tren de Aragua (Venezuelan gang operating across the Americas, including extensive U.S. sex and labor trafficking).
• MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha, originated in Central America, long documented in U.S. sex trafficking cases).
• Sinaloa Cartel (Mexican drug and trafficking cartel).
• Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) (one of the most violent Mexican cartels).
• Cártel del Noreste, Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, Carteles Unidos.

The FTO designation unlocked material-support prosecutions, asset-seizure authority, visa restrictions, and enhanced international cooperation. Within twelve months, federal prosecutors had filed a series of first-of-their-kind material-support-of-terrorism cases against cartel operatives, including six Sinaloa leaders charged in May 2025 and CJNG human-smuggling cases the same month.

260+ Tren de Aragua indictments

By April 2026, the Department of Justice reported more than 260 Tren de Aragua members federally indicted since January 2025. The first RICO indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York in April 2025, charged 27 defendants with sex trafficking of debt-bonded “multadas” (women fined and forced into commercial sex to pay the debt), narcotics, and firearms trafficking. Tren de Aragua’s top leader, “Niño Guerrero,” was indicted in December 2025.

The Southeast Asian scam-compound offensive

What changed most dramatically in 2025 was U.S. engagement with the Southeast Asian scam compounds — the largest forced-criminality trafficking operation in the world. Three actions stand out:

February 2025 — the cross-border raids

Triggered by the widely-publicized kidnapping of Chinese actor Wang Xing in January, the United States, Thailand, and China coordinated unprecedented operations against Myawaddy-area compounds on the Thailand–Myanmar border. Thailand cut power, internet, and gas to the compounds. Roughly 7,000 foreign workers were released and repatriated, nationals from more than 26 countries. This included the KK Park compound, one of the largest in Southeast Asia.

October 2025 — the $15 billion Bitcoin seizure

A joint U.S.–U.K. operation targeted Cambodia’s Prince Group, the single largest identified scam-compound network. Sanctions were imposed on Prince Group leadership. Chen Zhi, the group’s founder, was indicted. The Department of Justice forfeited approximately $14 billion in Bitcoin — the largest cryptocurrency forfeiture in U.S. history. On October 21, Myanmar’s military raided KK Park, arresting more than 2,000 people and seizing 30 Starlink terminals that had kept the compounds online.

October 2025 — FinCEN sanctions Huione Group

FinCEN designated Cambodia’s Huione Group a primary money-laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act — effectively cutting it off from the U.S. financial system. Huione had processed more than $4 billion in scam-compound proceeds between August 2021 and January 2025.

November 2025 — the Scam Center Strike Force

The Department of Justice launched a dedicated Scam Center Strike Force run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Coordinating with Treasury, FBI, HSI, and international partners, the Strike Force’s mission is the systematic dismantling of the forced-criminality compounds and their financial infrastructure.

Why this matters for American families

Americans lost roughly $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024 — most of it to the Southeast Asian compounds. Older Americans alone lost nearly $5 billion. A significant portion of those losses came from people themselves being beaten to do the scamming. The 2025 offensive targeted both ends of that equation: the victims trapped in the compounds and the American victims being scammed by them.

The 2025 sextortion operations

Two operations reshaped the fight against financial sextortion. Operation Artemis, launched in April 2025, deployed FBI agents to Nigeria to dismantle the “Yahoo Boys” networks responsible for most of the sextortion targeting American teenagers. Twenty-two Nigerians were arrested, roughly half linked to victim suicides. Operation Level Up, running since early 2024 and expanded in 2025, had by its reported expansion notified more than 8,100 sextortion victims, prevented $285 million in losses, and intervened in at least 80 suicide situations.

Operation Justice for All — 43 days, 3,266 arrests

Between August 25 and October 7, 2025, Homeland Security Task Forces in every state — established by executive order in January 2025 — carried out a coordinated anti-trafficking and transnational-crime surge. Over 400 operations nationwide. Approximately 3,266 arrests. Roughly $15 billion in proceeds seized from wire fraud and money laundering tied to the Cambodia scam centers.

The 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report

Released September 29, 2025, the annual State Department TIP Report assessed 188 countries. Key developments:

• Cambodia designated a state sponsor of trafficking — a historic first linked to its government’s tolerance of the scam compounds.
• 23 Tier 3 countries identified, including Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela.
• 13 countries formally identified as having a documented “government policy or pattern” of trafficking.
• First use of Global Magnitsky sanctions for forced labor in online scam operations.
• 102,027 trafficking victims identified worldwide, 27,759 of them labor trafficking.
• 7,975 total convictions globally — including 1,476 labor-trafficking convictions, the highest ever recorded.

What remains unfinished

Honest assessment: the 2025–2026 enforcement surge was real and substantial, but not every action hit its target. Courts ruled against the administration’s attempt to apply the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to Tren de Aragua deportations, with the Supreme Court requiring due process in April 2025. Some survivor-service grants were cut during the transition and later partially restored through court orders. The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act passed the House 406–1 in May 2025 and has stalled in the Senate. The Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act remains in committee. Funding stability for victim services continues to be a fight.

But the core architecture has changed. Scam compounds are now a federal law-enforcement priority with dedicated resources. Cartels face material-support-of-terrorism prosecutions. Platforms face 48-hour removal requirements for non-consensual imagery. That is the baseline going forward.

CHAPTER 14

New Laws Protecting Americans

Federal and state law changed more in the twelve months between May 2025 and April 2026 than in the preceding decade. Here is what is on the books.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act (federal, May 2025)

Signed May 19, 2025. Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Amy Klobuchar co-sponsored. Passed the Senate unanimously and the House 409 to 2. The law:

• Criminalizes knowing publication of non-consensual intimate imagery — real or AI-generated.
• Requires platforms to remove reported material within 48 hours of a valid notice.
• Covers “digital forgeries” — AI-generated deepfakes.
• Penalties: up to two years in federal prison (adult victim), up to three years (minor victim).
• Enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.
• Platforms must have notice-and-removal procedures in place by May 19, 2026.

The first federal conviction under the Act was obtained in April 2026 — an Ohio man who used AI tools to create non-consensual intimate imagery of local adults and children.

Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Act (federal, pending)

The reauthorization of the core federal anti-trafficking framework. As of April 2026, the House version (H.R. 1144) is in committee consideration. It would reauthorize programs through FY2029, fund the national hotline at $5 million per year, and create the new Frederick Douglass Human Trafficking Prevention Education Grants and the Human Trafficking Survivors Employment and Education Program — including expungement assistance for survivors carrying criminal records from their trafficking period.

Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (federal, pending)

Passed the House 406 to 1 on May 7, 2025. Referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Would impose sanctions, visa bans, asset freezes, civil fines up to $250,000, and criminal penalties up to $1 million and 20 years for willful offenders — targeting the forced-organ-harvesting trade that international tribunals have documented in China and elsewhere. Stalled in Senate as of April 2026.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in action

The UFLPA became law in 2021. Its impact is only now being measured. Customs and Border Protection has stopped tens of thousands of shipments suspected of being produced with forced labor — the total value stopped or detained has crossed roughly $3.9 billion as of late 2025. The UFLPA Entity List has grown to 144 entities, up from 20 at launch. Sectors added for enforcement in 2025: caustic soda, copper, lithium, red dates, steel — on top of aluminum, cotton, apparel, PVC, seafood, silica (polysilicon), and tomatoes.

What this means at your local store

If a product you were about to buy was made with forced labor, federal law now provides that it can be denied entry to the United States. That does not mean every bad product is blocked. But it means you can now, legally and practically, demand that retailers and brands document the source of their supply chains. Ask. Check. Vote with your wallet.

Homeland Security Task Forces (executive order, January 2025)

Executive Order 14159, signed January 20, 2025, directed the establishment of Homeland Security Task Forces in every state — joint federal, state, and local teams focused on transnational crime, trafficking, and smuggling. By the end of 2025, these task forces were participating in the largest coordinated trafficking-enforcement operations in American history.

State-level progress

Every U.S. state now has specific trafficking statutes. Quality varies dramatically. Two frameworks matter most:

Safe Harbor laws

Treat minors in commercial sex as victims, not offenders. Thirty states and Washington D.C. have enacted comprehensive Safe Harbor laws. Idaho and Maryland strengthened theirs in 2024. A state without Safe Harbor still prosecutes trafficked children for prostitution — an injustice advocates are working to end in every remaining state.

Vacatur laws

Allow trafficking survivors to clear criminal records for offenses committed under trafficker control. More than 35 states have some form of vacatur provision. The strongest (Nebraska, Wyoming, Florida, Idaho, D.C.) cover both arrests and convictions, include a broad range of offenses beyond prostitution, impose no time limits, and do not require the survivor to identify the trafficker. Clearing those records is what lets survivors rent apartments, get jobs, and rebuild lives.

What you can do about state law

Shared Hope International’s State Report Cards grade every state on how well its laws protect children from sex trafficking. The 2023 national average was an F (57.9 out of 100). Only Tennessee achieved a B. Look up your state at sharedhope.org. If your state scores poorly on any element — Safe Harbor, vacatur, buyer accountability, mandatory training — call your state representative and say so, by name.

CHAPTER 15

Technology on the Side of the Good Guys

Traffickers weaponized the internet. They are now being answered by a generation of tools built specifically to find victims, disrupt operations, and help families. The most important ones are free to the public or free to law enforcement.

For parents and survivors

Take It Down (NCMEC)

A free service run by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that helps minors remove nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos of themselves from participating online platforms. Anonymous. Available at TakeItDown.NCMEC.org. Launched in 2023 and expanded in 2025; now a critical tool for sextortion response.

Safer by Thorn

Technology originally built for platforms is also driving detection. Thorn’s Safer tools processed nearly 1.5 million known child-sexual-abuse-material files and flagged more than 3.8 million potential new abuse files in 2025 alone. It is why the major platforms can catch a meaningful percentage of what they find.

TraffickCam

A mobile app built by Marinus Analytics and the Exchange Initiative. Travelers photograph their hotel rooms — beds, carpets, angles — and upload them. The images feed a searchable database that law enforcement uses to match backgrounds in trafficking advertisements to specific hotels and rooms. Every time you travel, take a minute. Every photo helps.

For law enforcement

Traffic Jam (Marinus Analytics)

AI-powered investigation tool. Analyzes more than 1.3 billion records. Used by more than 5,000 users across law enforcement and NGOs. Matches faces across platforms, spots trafficking patterns, identifies geographic clusters. In two years, Traffic Jam analyzed 60,000 missing-person records and identified 734 as being advertised online — 95 percent of them girls and young women, 84 percent victims of color.

Spotlight and Thorn’s law-enforcement tools

Scans online sex advertisements to identify trafficking patterns. Used by more than a thousand law enforcement agencies. Investigations that once took two years have been reduced to three months in agencies that use it daily.

For supply-chain accountability

KnowTheChain

Benchmarks companies across technology, apparel, and food-and-beverage sectors on their forced-labor risk management. Free, public, searchable. Use it before you buy — especially for electronics, fast fashion, and packaged food.

Slavery Footprint

A short online quiz at madeinafreeworld.com that estimates how many people in modern slavery your lifestyle relies on, based on the products you use. Confronting — and a useful conversation starter.

Protect what matters

If you take one technology step today: sign up your family’s major accounts for two-factor authentication. Review privacy settings on every social app your child uses. Bookmark CyberTipline.org and Take It Down. And if you travel regularly, install TraffickCam. None of it costs anything. All of it matters.

PART FIVE

Get Involved

Organizations fighting back — and how to join them

CHAPTER 16

Organizations on the Frontlines

This chapter is a directory of the nonprofits, hotlines, and task forces that carry the day-to-day weight of the anti-trafficking fight. Every one of them accepts volunteers, donations, or both. Every one of them has survivor service, policy, or prevention work you can join from anywhere in the country.

Prevention and direct services

Polaris Project

Runs the data and research infrastructure of the U.S. anti-trafficking field. Produces the National Survivor Study, the Trafficking Typology, and trains hotline operators. polarisproject.org.

International Justice Mission (IJM)

Global operator rescuing trafficking victims and prosecuting traffickers. Longstanding OSEC (online sexual exploitation of children) work in the Philippines, anti-slavery work in India, and anti-violence work in sub-Saharan Africa. ijm.org.

Covenant House

The largest privately-funded provider of services to homeless and trafficked youth in North America, with shelters across the U.S., Canada, and Central America. Their Human Trafficking Institute does the research that documents how foster care, LGBTQ+ rejection, and homelessness feed the trafficking pipeline. covenanthouse.org.

CAST (Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking)

Provides legal services and long-term survivor support, especially for labor trafficking victims. Pioneered survivor-led programming. castla.org.

Shared Hope International

Grades every state’s anti-trafficking laws in the Report Cards on Child & Youth Sex Trafficking. Drives state-level legislative change. sharedhope.org.

Thorn

Builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse online. Developer of Safer and Spotlight. thorn.org.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)

Operates the CyberTipline, the federal clearinghouse for online child exploitation reports. Runs Take It Down, child-search infrastructure, and family support. missingkids.org.

Healthcare and first-responder networks

HEAL Trafficking

Global network of thousands of healthcare professionals and survivors across 45 countries. Publishes the HEAL Protocol Toolkit used to build response programs in hospitals and clinics. healtrafficking.org.

Truckers Against Trafficking

Trains long-haul truck drivers, truck stops, and travel plazas to recognize and report trafficking. Their tips have been credited with dozens of rescues. truckersagainsttrafficking.org.

Policy and coalition building

Freedom Network USA

National coalition of anti-trafficking service providers. Protects funding streams, coordinates provider advocacy, centers survivor leadership. freedomnetworkusa.org.

National Survivor Network

Survivor-led advocacy body. Drives policy change through lived-experience testimony and leadership training. nationalsurvivornetwork.org.

Programs for youth

Love146

Prevention curriculum used in schools across the country. Survivor care for young people. love146.org.

Safe House Project

Specializes in rapid housing for minor sex trafficking survivors — the most severe service gap in the country. safehouseproject.org.

REST (Real Escape from the Sex Trade)

Seattle-based, with a model now replicated elsewhere: comprehensive exit services, housing, and advocacy. iwantrest.com.

Global awareness

A21 Campaign

Runs trafficking hotlines in multiple countries and organizes the annual Walk for Freedom — hundreds of thousands of participants walk silent in communities worldwide every October to raise awareness. a21.org.

Where to start

If you can give $25 a month: pick one organization and commit. Sustained donations fund staff, not one-off campaigns.

If you can give time: most of these organizations have remote volunteer work — hotline support, research, translation, social media, awareness event organization.

If you can give voice: follow three of them, share their work, and tell your elected officials which issues matter.

CHAPTER 17

The Citizen Action Checklist

Everything in this guide comes down to a simple question: what will you do differently on Monday? This chapter is the answer, sorted by who you are.

If you are a parent or guardian

• Have the conversation. The one that ends “you can come to me, no matter what.” Repeat it.
• Audit your child’s device this week: apps, friends, privacy settings, two-factor authentication.
• Bookmark CyberTipline.org and TakeItDown.NCMEC.org on your phone.
• Tell older relatives about pig-butchering scams. They are the primary financial targets.
• Install TraffickCam. Use it every time you travel.

If you are an educator

• Learn the grooming sequence in Chapter 5. Teach it in health or digital-citizenship class.
• Know the signs of trafficking: unexplained money, a much older “boyfriend,” unexplained absences.
• Post the National Human Trafficking Hotline number somewhere visible in your classroom.
• Advocate for Love146 or similar age-appropriate prevention curriculum in your district.
• Know who your school’s reporting line is. Do not investigate alone; escalate.

If you work in healthcare

• Read the HEAL Protocol Toolkit. Even one clinician in a practice who knows the signs changes everything.
• Separate patients from whoever brought them — at least once — in a private setting before treatment.
• Ask the open question: “Is there anything about your situation you would like to tell me in private?”
• Know your state’s mandatory reporting law.

If you work in hospitality or travel

• Take the Truckers Against Trafficking or Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) training.
• Watch for the signs: multiple room rentals, no luggage, paid in cash, minors with adults who do not appear to be relatives.
• Know your property’s trafficking-response protocol.
• Call 1-888-373-7888 when in doubt.

If you are an employer

• Audit your supply chain for forced-labor exposure. KnowTheChain benchmarks can help.
• If you employ H-2A or H-2B visa workers, ensure workers keep their own identification documents and are paid independently.
• Provide grievance channels that do not pass through supervisors.
• Post hotline posters in break rooms and bathrooms, in languages workers actually speak.

If you are a faith leader or community organizer

• Host a 45-minute community briefing using this booklet as an outline. Invite local law enforcement or an anti-trafficking organization representative.
• Work with a partner organization that serves survivors — Covenant House, Safe House Project, a local affiliate.
• Watch for vulnerability signals in your community: housing instability, family crisis, rejection of youth.

If you vote or pay taxes (that is, all of us)

• Look up your state’s Shared Hope Report Card grade. If your state is below a B, call your state representative.
• Tell your U.S. senators to pass the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act.
• Tell them to pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act.
• Support enforcement funding for FBI, HSI, and the DOJ Scam Center Strike Force.
• Ask retailers where their products were made. Public pressure works.

If you are a consumer

• Take the Slavery Footprint quiz once. It will change how you shop.
• Check KnowTheChain benchmarks before major electronics, apparel, and food-brand purchases.
• Look for Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and Fair Food Program certifications.
• When you see trafficking-risk indicators in a business you frequent — a massage parlor that operates at strange hours, a nail salon where workers never speak — call the hotline. Operators handle ambiguity.

The difference between a slavery-free future and the one we are in is not heroes. It is ordinary people doing small things consistently: watching, calling, teaching, voting, documenting. This is that kind of fight.

PART SIX

The Watchtower Toolkit

A citizen research framework for documenting, preserving, and investigating trafficking

CHAPTER 18

Watchtower: A Research Toolkit for Citizens

Some of the most important anti-trafficking work in the last twenty years was done by people without badges. Parents who documented the predator who harmed their child until prosecutors had a case. Journalists who mapped shell companies until a laundering network collapsed. Volunteers who archived websites before evidence disappeared. Survivors who named the people who hurt them in ways that could be verified.

Watchtower is a citizen-grade research framework for anyone who wants to do that work responsibly. It is not a replacement for law enforcement, and it is not an invitation to vigilantism. It is a disciplined method for observing, preserving evidence, and building documentation that either supports real investigations or strengthens public understanding.

Before you start

Watchtower is not investigation of private individuals based on hunches. It is investigation of patterns, institutions, records, and publicly available information. If you find information that suggests an immediate crime is in progress or a victim is in danger, stop and call the National Human Trafficking Hotline, NCMEC, or the FBI. The toolkit supports law enforcement; it never substitutes for them.

Do not confront anyone. Do not publish accusations. Do not investigate a minor’s private communications without a parent’s knowledge. Your job is to observe, record, and hand well-organized material to professionals or to the public record.

The five disciplines

Watchtower organizes citizen research around five practices. Each one uses widely-available tools. Most are free.

1. Essential tools to download

Build a research environment before you start looking at anything sensitive. A little preparation pays off when you need to move fast.

Tool

What it does

Why it matters

Wayback Machine Downloader

Pulls old versions of websites from the Internet Archive

Websites disappear. Archiving now means evidence later.

ArchiveBox

Creates offline snapshots of live pages

Your own private archive, not dependent on anyone else’s server.

Zotero

Saves PDFs, articles, links, and notes in one searchable library

Research organization. Every source you cite, in one place.

yt-dlp

Downloads videos from public sites

Captures material that is often scrubbed fast.

ExifTool

Extracts hidden metadata from images and videos

A photograph’s EXIF data can reveal where, when, and on what device it was taken.

All five tools are free, open-source, and run on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

2. Investigation workflow

Good research looks boring. It is organized, repeatable, and leaves a clean trail anyone could reconstruct.

• Create a folder structure that scales. One master folder per topic or case. Inside: raw captures, processed material, notes, sources, and output drafts. Every file named with the date it was collected.
• Use open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools to map relationships. Maltego, Spiderfoot, and the IntelTechniques toolkit let you pull together connections between people, organizations, properties, and domains from public records. Start narrow. Verify everything.
• Document every step. Screenshots with timestamps. Source URLs next to every claim. If you cannot explain how you know something, you do not know it — you guessed.
• Track sources in Zotero or Obsidian. Zotero handles citations; Obsidian handles the linked notes. Either one beats a sprawling folder of PDFs you cannot search.

Applied to trafficking research

Examples of appropriate Watchtower workflow topics: tracking how a specific massage-parlor network opens and closes storefronts; documenting how a large nonprofit you are about to donate to actually spends money; archiving online advertisements for later pattern analysis by researchers; preserving social-media activity of a platform or forum where grooming patterns are visible before a platform scrubs it.

Not appropriate: amateur surveillance of specific private individuals based on rumor, vigilante operations of any kind, or publication of accusations that have not been verified to a legal standard.

3. Public records and financial tracking

The paper trail of modern trafficking is longer than most people realize. Nonprofits file tax returns. Corporations register in state databases. Federal lawsuits produce dockets. Grants and contracts are recorded. Every piece is public.

Resource

What you can find

ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer

IRS Form 990 filings: board members, executive pay, revenues, major grants. Free.

PACER and RECAP

Federal court records. PACER is the official system; RECAP mirrors millions of documents free via CourtListener.

OpenCorporates and Companies House

Corporate registrations, ownership structures, shell company networks. International coverage.

USAspending.gov

Federal grants, contracts, subcontracts — who is getting government money and for what.

GuideStar

Nonprofit profiles with extended financial history.

SEC EDGAR

Public-company filings when a trafficking case involves corporate actors.

FinCEN’s published advisories

Red flags and typologies financial institutions are told to watch for.

Use this before you donate, not just during investigations

Before giving money to any anti-trafficking organization, look them up in ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Check where the money actually goes. Executive compensation. Program vs fundraising ratios. How much is spent on victims vs awareness campaigns. The difference between a well-run survivor-service organization and a marketing operation with a good domain name is visible in 15 minutes of records review.

4. Cybersecurity practices

If you are going to document sensitive material — whether case notes on a pattern in your community, screenshots of online exploitation, or research on organized networks — you need to protect it. From loss, from tampering, and from exposing your sources.

• Encrypt sensitive files. Veracrypt and Cryptomator are free, audited, and create encrypted containers for your research. Without encryption, anything sensitive on a lost or stolen laptop is a breach.
• Keep multiple offline and cloud backups. Rule of three: one live copy, one local backup (external drive), one cloud backup. At least one copy must be encrypted and offline.
• Preserve metadata — never overwrite originals. A modified file is not evidence. Keep the original, untouched. Work from copies.
• Document chain of custody. Every time a file is accessed, transferred, or shared, note when, to whom, and why. A spreadsheet is enough. What you are building is a trail a journalist, prosecutor, or researcher could verify.

If your research involves child sexual abuse material (CSAM)

Do not download, store, preserve, or share it. Not for evidence. Not for any reason. Possession is a federal crime regardless of intent. If you encounter CSAM online, report to NCMEC’s CyberTipline at CyberTipline.org or 1-800-843-5678. NCMEC is the legally designated clearinghouse and will handle preservation and transmission to law enforcement. Your only role is reporting.

5. Publish and preserve

Good research sitting in a personal folder changes nothing. Getting it into the right hands — a journalist, a prosecutor, a nonprofit research team, or the public record — is where impact happens.

• White papers. LibreOffice or Microsoft Word for structured reports. Use footnotes. Cite every source.
• Network maps. Kumu.io (web-based, free for public projects) or Maltego for visualizing relationships between people, organizations, and locations.
• Archive exports. Package your research as PDFs, ZIPs, and image-evidence bundles at regular intervals. What is not exported and backed up does not exist.
• Handoff paths. For trafficking-specific findings: the FBI, HSI, or the National Human Trafficking Hotline as appropriate. For systemic or policy-level findings: investigative journalists at outlets that cover trafficking, or organizations like IJM, Polaris, or Shared Hope that do policy research.

Getting started with Watchtower

You do not need to be a researcher to use this toolkit. Pick one of the following and give it an hour this week:

• Look up three anti-trafficking organizations on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Compare how they spend money.
• Download the free trials of Zotero and Obsidian. Import one article. See what the workflow feels like.
• Pick one news story about a trafficking case in your state. Archive every linked source using ArchiveBox or the Wayback Machine. In five years, half of those links will be dead.
• Read the last ten years of federal TIP Reports at state.gov. Notice what has changed, and what has not.
• Follow three investigative journalists who cover trafficking. Subscribe to their newsletters.

The ethics of citizen research

Five rules that keep Watchtower honest

• Harm prevention first. If you find an active threat to a specific person, stop and call a hotline. No story is worth a victim’s life.
• Verification before publication. Multiple sources. Documentary evidence. If you cannot show your work, do not publish it.
• Privacy respect. Document patterns and institutions, not minors, not private health information, not unverified personal allegations.
• Transparency with methods. Show how you got what you got. Citizen research holds up only when it can be independently retraced.
• Hand off. Research that sits in a folder helps no one. Build toward a handoff to journalism, to law enforcement, or to the public record.

The internet gave traffickers scale. It also gave citizens the tools to watch. The difference between rumor and evidence, between noise and impact, is discipline. Watchtower is that discipline.

What you build with this toolkit, if you use it well, is not just a personal project. It is a contribution to a growing citizen-research commons that complements professional journalism and law enforcement. Every well-preserved archive, every well-sourced white paper, every network map that holds up to scrutiny — they become part of the public record the next investigator, prosecutor, or reporter will build on.

The crisis this booklet documents is enormous. The people fighting it are too few. Citizens with discipline, patience, and a commitment to accuracy can help close that gap.

QUICK REFERENCE

Hotlines and Resources

Call or text now

Use For

Contact

Immediate danger to anyone

911

Suspected trafficking (any type)

1-888-373-7888 • Text BEFREE to 233733

Online child exploitation

1-800-843-5678 • CyberTipline.org

Sextortion / internet crime

IC3.gov • 1-800-CALL-FBI

Labor, migrant, or cross-border trafficking

HSI: 1-866-347-2423 • ice.gov/tipline

Remove intimate images (minors)

TakeItDown.NCMEC.org

Missing child

1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678)

Organizations worth knowing

Organization

Focus

Web

Polaris Project

Data, research, policy

polarisproject.org

NCMEC

Online child exploitation, missing children

missingkids.org

International Justice Mission

Global rescue, prosecution

ijm.org

Covenant House

Homeless and trafficked youth

covenanthouse.org

Shared Hope International

State-law reform

sharedhope.org

CAST

Survivor legal services, labor trafficking

castla.org

Thorn

Technology for child safety

thorn.org

HEAL Trafficking

Healthcare network

healtrafficking.org

Truckers Against Trafficking

Transportation sector

truckersagainsttrafficking.org

Freedom Network USA

Service-provider coalition

freedomnetworkusa.org

A21 Campaign

Global awareness, Walk for Freedom

a21.org

Love146

Prevention, youth care

love146.org

Safe House Project

Rapid housing for survivors

safehouseproject.org

Where the numbers came from

Every statistic in this booklet was drawn from primary sources published by the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Walk Free Foundation, the U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Federal Trade Commission, Polaris Project, the Internet Watch Foundation, Thorn, Marinus Analytics, and peer-reviewed research published between 2020 and April 2026. Where sources conflicted or figures carried methodological caveats, the more conservative number was used and the limitation was noted.

If one fact in this booklet changed what you do next, it did its job.

Pass it on. Printed copies, digital versions, torn-out pages. The more people in a community who know the signs and the numbers, the harder it is for trafficking to hide.

— END —

APPENDIX

References

Every statistic, case summary, and policy fact in this booklet is drawn from primary sources: United Nations and U.S. federal reports, peer-reviewed research, major nonprofit studies, court records, and reputable news outlets. Citations follow Chicago Notes-Bibliography style and are organized by chapter so you can verify any specific claim.

Where sources conflict or figures carry methodological caveats, the more conservative number was used and the limitation was noted in context. No Wikipedia or user-edited encyclopedia content was cited in this booklet.

CHAPTER 1 — The Scale of Modern Slavery

International Labour Organization, Walk Free Foundation, and International Organization for Migration. Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. Geneva: ILO, September 2022. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/global-estimates-modern-slavery-forced-labour-and-forced-marriage.

International Labour Organization. Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour. Geneva: ILO, March 19, 2024. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/annual-profits-forced-labour-amount-us-236-billion-ilo-report-finds.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024. Vienna: UNODC, December 11, 2024. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/glotip.html.

Walk Free Foundation. Global Slavery Index 2023. Perth: Walk Free, May 24, 2023. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/.

Walk Free Foundation. “G20 Imports of At-Risk Products.” In Global Slavery Index 2023. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/global-findings/.

CHAPTER 2 — Trafficking in America: The 2020–2024 Baseline

Polaris Project. “The 2024 Hotline Data Is Here—And It Tells a Story of Hope, Resilience, and Action.” Polaris Project, June 12, 2025. https://polarisproject.org/blog/2025/06/the-2024-hotline-data-is-here/.

Polaris Project. U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline Statistics. https://polarisproject.org/resources/us-national-human-trafficking-hotline-statistics/.

National Human Trafficking Hotline. Statistics Dashboard. https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/statistics.

U.S. Department of Transportation. “Human Trafficking 101.” https://www.transportation.gov/stop-human-trafficking/human-trafficking-101.

U.S. Department of State. 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, September 29, 2025. https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/.

CHAPTER 3 — Forms of Exploitation

International Labour Organization. What Is Forced Labour? https://www.ilo.org/topics/forced-labour-modern-slavery-and-trafficking-persons/what-forced-labour.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024. Vienna: UNODC, December 11, 2024.

U.S. Department of Justice. Office of Public Affairs. “Largest Labor Trafficking Prosecution in U.S. History” (Operation Blooming Onion indictment, Southern District of Georgia, November 2021). https://www.justice.gov/opa.

Polaris Project. In Harm’s Way: How Systems Fail Human Trafficking Survivors. National Survivor Study. Washington, DC: Polaris Project, 2023. https://polarisproject.org/national-survivor-study/.

UNICEF. “Child Marriage: Latest Trends and Future Prospects.” UNICEF Data. https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-protection/child-marriage/.

CHAPTER 4 — Who Is Vulnerable — And Who Traffics

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “Key Facts.” https://www.missingkids.org/ourwork/impact.

International Justice Mission and the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham. Scale of Harm: Estimating the Prevalence of Trafficking to Produce Child Sexual Exploitation Material in the Philippines. Washington, DC: IJM, September 2023. https://www.ijm.org/reports.

Thorn. Responding to Online Threats: Minors’ Perspectives on Disclosing, Reporting, and Blocking. El Segundo, CA: Thorn, 2023. https://www.thorn.org/research/.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. “FBI-Led Sweep Targeting Sex Traffickers Recovers Dozens of Minor Victims.” FBI News. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-led-sweep-targeting-sex-traffickers-recovers-dozens-of-minor-victims.

CHAPTER 5 — How Traffickers Find Children Online

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “NCMEC Releases New Data: 2024 in Numbers.” April 29, 2025. https://www.missingkids.org/blog/2025/ncmec-releases-new-data-2024-in-numbers.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. CyberTipline Data. https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata.

Thorn. “What the 2024 NCMEC CyberTipline Report Says About Child Safety.” May 2025. https://www.thorn.org/blog/what-the-2024-ncmec-cybertipline-report-says-about-child-safety/.

U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “Grassley Releases New and Disturbing Information on Online Child Exploitation, Presses Tech Giants for Answers.” November 2025. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/grassley-releases-new-and-disturbing-information-on-online-child-exploitation-presses-tech-giants-for-answers.

CHAPTER 6 — The Sextortion Crisis

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center. 2024 Internet Crime Report. Washington, DC: FBI, April 23, 2025. https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-annual-internet-crime-report.

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. “FinCEN Notice on Financially Motivated Sextortion.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Treasury, September 2025. https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/2025-09/FinCEN-Notice-FMS-508C.pdf.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Operation Artemis: Nigeria Sextortion Takedown.” FBI News, April 25, 2025.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Operation Level Up.” FBI Victim Services. https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/victim-services/national-crimes-and-victim-resources/operation-level-up.

Crimes Against Children Foundation. “Sextortion: The Complete Guide for Parents.” https://www.crimesagainstchildrenfoundation.org/blogs/sextortion-complete-guide-for-parents.

CHAPTER 7 — AI-Generated Abuse and Deepfakes

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. CyberTipline 2024 Annual Report. https://www.missingkids.org/blog/2025/ncmec-releases-new-data-2024-in-numbers.

Internet Watch Foundation. AI CSAM Report 2026: Harm Without Limits. Cambridge, UK: IWF, March 2026. https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/how-ai-is-being-abused-to-create-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/.

Internet Watch Foundation. “IWF Warns of Surge in Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Hosted in EU.” April 23, 2025. https://www.iwf.org.uk/news-media/news/charity-raises-alarm-over-surge-in-level-of-child-sexual-abuse-imagery-hosted-in-eu/.

Tech Transparency Project. “Nudify Apps on the App Store and Google Play.” Washington, DC: TTP, April 15, 2026. https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/.

Pfefferkorn, Riana. “Letter to NCMEC on AI-Flagged CyberTipline Reports.” Stanford Center for Internet and Society, January 2026.

TAKE IT DOWN Act, Pub. L. No. 119-12 (May 19, 2025). https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/146.

CHAPTER 8 — Scam Compounds and Forced Criminality

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Online Scam Operations and Trafficking into Forced Criminality in Southeast Asia. Geneva: OHCHR, August 2023. Updated February 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/02/un-report-details-grave-abuses-against-those-trafficked-scam-centres.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Inflection Point: Global Implications of Scam Centres, Underground Banking and Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia. Bangkok: UNODC, April 2025.

U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. China’s Exploitation of Scam Centers in Southeast Asia. Washington, DC: USCC, July 2025. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/Chinas_Exploitation_of_Scam_Centers_in_Southeast_Asia.pdf.

Federal Trade Commission. “New FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024.” March 10, 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/03/new-ftc-data-show-big-jump-reported-losses-fraud-125-billion-2024.

Chainalysis. “DOJ Seizes $15 Billion in Bitcoin from Southeast Asia Crypto Scam Network.” October 2025. https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/southeast-asia-crypto-scam-network-mining-pig-butchering-october-2025/.

TRM Labs. “Historic U.S.–U.K. Operation Targets Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds with Record $15 Billion Bitcoin Seizure.” October 2025. https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/.

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. “FinCEN Designates Huione Group a Primary Money Laundering Concern.” U.S. Department of the Treasury, October 2025.

Griffin, John, and Kevin Mei. “How Do Crypto Flows Finance Slavery?” University of Texas, 2024.

CHAPTER 9 — Warning Signs in Your Community

Polaris Project. Recognizing the Signs of Trafficking. https://polarisproject.org/recognize-the-signs/.

Office on Trafficking in Persons. “Identify Victims.” Administration for Children and Families. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/victim-assistance/identify-victims.

Blue Campaign. Indicators of Human Trafficking. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/indicators-human-trafficking.

CHAPTER 10 — How to Report — And What Happens Next

National Human Trafficking Hotline. https://humantraffickinghotline.org.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. CyberTipline. https://report.cybertip.org.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Submit a Tip. https://tips.fbi.gov.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. HSI Tip Line. https://www.ice.gov/tipline.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Take It Down. https://takeitdown.ncmec.org.

CHAPTER 11 — Protecting Your Family

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. NetSmartz. https://www.missingkids.org/netsmartz.

Thorn for Parents. https://www.thorn.org/thorn-for-parents/.

Common Sense Media. Parent Resources on Digital Safety. https://www.commonsensemedia.org.

CHAPTER 12 — Landmark Prosecutions, 2020–2024

United States v. Epstein, No. 19-CR-490 (S.D.N.Y. 2019). Indictment of July 2019.

U.S. Department of Justice. Office of Public Affairs. “Jeffrey Epstein Charged in Manhattan Federal Court with Sex Trafficking of Minors.” July 8, 2019.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program.” Status reports, 2020–2025.

Epstein Files Transparency Act, Pub. L. No. 119-XX (November 2025).

United States v. Maxwell, No. 20-CR-330 (S.D.N.Y.). Verdict December 29, 2021; sentencing June 28, 2022.

United States v. Maxwell, Second Circuit Court of Appeals, affirming conviction, September 2024.

Supreme Court of the United States. Denial of certiorari in Maxwell v. United States, October 6, 2025.

United States v. Combs, No. 24-CR-542 (S.D.N.Y.). Indictment September 2024; verdict July 2, 2025; sentencing October 3, 2025.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Sean Combs Sentenced to 50 Months in Federal Prison.” Press release, October 3, 2025.

Ventura v. Combs, No. 23-CV-10099 (S.D.N.Y. 2023). Complaint filed November 16, 2023; settled November 17, 2023.

United States v. Raniere, No. 18-CR-204 (E.D.N.Y.). Conviction 2019; sentencing 2020.

United States v. Kelly, No. 19-CR-286 (E.D.N.Y. 2021) and No. 19-CR-567 (N.D. Ill. 2022).

United States v. Pratt et al., No. 20-CR-1104 (S.D. Cal.). Conviction 2024; sentencing June 2025.

United States v. Mendoza-Lopez et al. (Operation Blooming Onion), No. 21-CR-23 (S.D. Ga. 2021).

United States v. Lacey et al. (Backpage.com), No. 18-CR-422 (D. Ariz. 2018–2023).

U.S. Department of Labor. “Packers Sanitation Services to Pay $1.5 Million in Civil Penalties.” News Release, February 17, 2023.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Operation Cross Country XIII: Nationwide Operation Results.” FBI News, August 2023. https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/washingtondc/news/fbi-announces-results-of-nationwide-sex-trafficking-operation.

CHAPTER 13 — The 2025–2026 Enforcement Surge

U.S. Department of State. “Designation of International Cartels.” February 20, 2025. https://www.state.gov/designation-of-international-cartels.

Holland & Knight. “Trump Administration Announces Designation of International Cartels.” Client Alert, February 2025. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/02/trump-administration-announces-designation-of-international-cartels.

Congressional Research Service. Designating Cartels and Other Criminal Organizations as Foreign Terrorists: Recent Developments. Washington, DC: CRS, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11205.

U.S. Department of Justice. Indictments of Tren de Aragua members, Southern District of New York and other districts, 2025.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Scam Center Strike Force.” Press Release, November 12, 2025.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Operation Justice for All: 3,266 Arrests Over 43 Days.” Press Release, October 2025.

U.S. Department of State. 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, September 29, 2025.

Al Jazeera. “Myanmar Military Arrests More Than 2,000 at Infamous Scam Centre.” October 21, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/21/myanmar-military-arrests-more-than-2000-people-at-infamous-scam-centre.

NPR. “China Repatriates More Than 1,000 Online Scam Workers Rescued from Myanmar.” February 20, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/g-s1-49816/china-repatriates-workers-myanmar-thailand.

CHAPTER 14 — New Laws Protecting Americans

TAKE IT DOWN Act, S. 146, 119th Cong. Signed May 19, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/146.

Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2025, H.R. 1144, 119th Cong.

Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, H.R. 1503, 119th Cong. Passed House 406–1, May 7, 2025.

Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, Pub. L. No. 117-78 (December 23, 2021). Enforcement data through November 2025 from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Executive Order 14159. “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” January 20, 2025.

Shared Hope International. State Report Cards on Child & Youth Sex Trafficking. 2023 Edition. https://reportcards.sharedhope.org.

Shared Hope International. “Just Like Me” Report Card. Launched October 2025. https://sharedhope.org.

CHAPTER 15 — Technology on the Side of the Good Guys

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Take It Down. https://takeitdown.ncmec.org.

Thorn. Safer 2025 Impact Report. El Segundo, CA: Thorn, 2026. https://safer.io.

Marinus Analytics. Traffic Jam and STAR: Impact Report. Pittsburgh, PA: Marinus Analytics, 2025. https://www.marinusanalytics.com.

Exchange Initiative. TraffickCam. https://traffickcam.com.

KnowTheChain. Benchmarks on Forced Labor Risk Management. https://knowthechain.org.

Made In A Free World. Slavery Footprint. https://slaveryfootprint.org.

CHAPTER 16 — Organizations on the Frontlines

Polaris Project. https://polarisproject.org.

International Justice Mission. https://www.ijm.org.

Covenant House. https://www.covenanthouse.org.

Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST). https://www.castla.org.

Shared Hope International. https://sharedhope.org.

Thorn. https://www.thorn.org.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. https://www.missingkids.org.

HEAL Trafficking. https://healtrafficking.org.

Truckers Against Trafficking. https://truckersagainsttrafficking.org.

Freedom Network USA. https://freedomnetworkusa.org.

A21 Campaign. https://a21.org.

Love146. https://love146.org.

Safe House Project. https://safehouseproject.org.

REST (Real Escape from the Sex Trade). https://iwantrest.com.

CHAPTER 17 — The Citizen Action Checklist

HEAL Trafficking. HEAL Protocol Toolkit. https://healtrafficking.org/heal-protocol-toolkit/.

Truckers Against Trafficking. Training and Materials. https://truckersagainsttrafficking.org/training.

Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST). https://bestalliance.org.

KnowTheChain. How to Evaluate a Company. https://knowthechain.org.

CHAPTER 18 — Watchtower: A Research Toolkit for Citizens

Internet Archive. Wayback Machine Downloader. https://archive.org.

ArchiveBox. https://archivebox.io.

Zotero. https://www.zotero.org.

yt-dlp project. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.

ExifTool by Phil Harvey. https://exiftool.org.

Maltego. https://www.maltego.com.

Spiderfoot. https://www.spiderfoot.net.

Bazzell, Michael. Open Source Intelligence Techniques. 10th ed. IntelTechniques.com, 2023.

Obsidian. https://obsidian.md.

ProPublica. Nonprofit Explorer. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/.

Free Law Project. CourtListener and RECAP. https://www.courtlistener.com.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). https://pacer.uscourts.gov.

OpenCorporates. https://opencorporates.com.

Companies House (UK). https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/companies-house.

USAspending.gov. Federal Spending Records. https://www.usaspending.gov.

Candid. GuideStar Nonprofit Profiles. https://www.guidestar.org.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/edgar.

Veracrypt. https://www.veracrypt.fr.

Cryptomator. https://cryptomator.org.

Kumu. https://kumu.io.

LibreOffice. The Document Foundation. https://www.libreoffice.org.

A note on accuracy

Facts change. Court rulings, legislative status, hotline operators, and organizational leadership are all subject to update. Every citation above links to a primary source so you can check whether anything has moved since this booklet went to print. If you find an error, report it through the publishing channel so future editions can correct the record.