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Freedom Collaborative’s third briefing paper on trafficking for forced criminality examines why forced labour linked to online scam operations can remain difficult to identify, even when the indicators of exploitation are well established.
Survivors consistently describe deceptive recruitment, debt, document confiscation, restrictions on movement, isolation, threats, violence and coercive control. These are familiar indicators of forced labour, long used to identify exploitation across sectors such as agriculture, fishing, manufacturing and construction. What differs in online scam operations is where evidence of those indicators becomes visible.
Forced Labour in a Criminal Economy
In more traditional labour settings, evidence of exploitation is often concentrated around an identifiable workplace, employer or recruitment chain. Labour inspections, recruitment records, wage documentation and worker complaints may all provide opportunities — however imperfect — for detection and intervention.
Online scam operations present a different environment. Relevant evidence may be dispersed across technology platforms, financial institutions, immigration systems, criminal investigations and civil society organizations.
A technology platform may detect recruitment activity, while a bank or cryptocurrency exchange identifies suspicious financial patterns. Immigration or consular officials may encounter an individual without valid documentation, investigators may identify criminal activity or networks, and civil society organizations may later hear a survivor’s account of coercion, confinement and abuse.
Each actor may therefore hold an important part of the same case without necessarily seeing the whole picture.
Detected, but in Fragments
These cases are not necessarily going wholly undetected. Rather, different elements may be detected repeatedly, but in fragments.
Recruitment, movement, coercion, financial activity, criminal conduct and survivor disclosure may all be visible somewhere without being connected in a way that enables timely identification and protection. As a result, individuals coerced into criminal activity may first be treated as suspected offenders or immigration violators before the conditions under which that activity occurred are properly understood.
The challenge is therefore not simply whether indicators of forced labour can be identified, but whether information held across different systems can be connected in time to change the response.
Connecting the Data
One seemingly straightforward solution is greater information-sharing between the different actors encountering these cases. In practice, however, connecting this information is considerably more complicated.
Technology companies, financial institutions, immigration authorities, law enforcement agencies and civil society organizations collect information for different purposes and operate under different mandates, evidentiary standards, confidentiality obligations and protection responsibilities.
When survivor information is involved, there are additional considerations. Sharing information may create risks of re-identification or retaliation, or result in information being used beyond the purpose for which it was originally collected. Questions of consent and protection therefore need to be considered alongside the potential benefits of greater coordination.
From Information-Sharing to Practical Coordination
The briefing paper argues that addressing these gaps requires more than simply sharing more information. Practical referral and coordination arrangements are needed between anti-trafficking, anti-fraud, immigration and financial-crime actors, including clear referral triggers and agreement on what information can be shared, on what basis, with what safeguards and for what purpose.
It also highlights the importance of early screening for trafficking for forced criminality and recognizes civil society organizations as important sources of operational insight, subject to appropriate consent and protection safeguards.
Traditional forced labour tools remain essential, but they were not designed for an exploitation model in which relevant evidence is dispersed across multiple systems and institutions. The challenge is not necessarily to develop new indicators, but to better understand where existing indicators become visible and how different parts of the same case can be connected safely and in time to support protection, accountability and effective investigation.
Read the full briefing paper, The Indicators Are Familiar, the Visibility Is Not.
