On 19 October 2026, Freedom Collaborative presented its fourth briefing paper on trafficking for forced criminality at a side event at the 13th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC COP13) in Vienna. The paper examines the expansion of scam operations into new regions, and what that expansion does, and does not, tell us about trafficking.
The side event, “Adapting and Expanding: The Evolving Organized Crime Ecosystem of Scam Trafficking”, was hosted by Australia and co-organized by Freedom Collaborative and Humanity Research Consultancy, following up on our side event at COP12 in 2024. Australia’s anti-trafficking ambassador, Jane Duke, gave opening remarks, followed by Colonel Dana Humaid, Director General of the International Affairs Bureau at the UAE Ministry of Interior, who shared the UAE perspective. Freedom Collaborative CEO Julia Macher presented the briefing paper, alongside Eric Kasper of Humanity Research Consultancy and Panagiotis Papadimitriou of UNODC, with Martin Fowke of UNODC as moderator.
Expansion Is Not the Same as Trafficking
The spread of scam operations does not in itself establish that trafficking is taking place. Some people participate knowingly in fraud. Others, including people who knew the work involved fraud, are held through debt, threats or other forms of control, and in many cases their circumstances cannot be established. Equally, the absence of a large compound does not mean the absence of coercion or exploitation.
Replication and Integration
The briefing paper suggests that what is spreading is not a type of site but an operating model, shaped by two processes. Through replication, experienced personnel, scam methods, recruitment practices and technology travel across regions, which explains why operations often look similar. Through integration, operations adapt to existing criminal networks, infrastructure, labour markets and coercive structures, which explains why they also look different. The result is a range of overlapping forms, from large compounds to residential operations, registered businesses and remote work. These are not sequential stages, and none of them in itself establishes whether trafficking is occurring.
UNODC contributed its analysis of Latin America and the Caribbean to the paper. In parts of the region, scam operations appear to be integrating into existing territorial criminal structures rather than operating from enclosed compounds.
The Hardest Cases to Identify
Some of the hardest cases look entirely lawful or leave nothing to inspect. Practitioners describe operations run through registered companies, recruitment inside immigration detention with scam work continuing from home after release, and people coerced into recruiting others who are then prosecuted as offenders. As our previous briefing paper showed, the indicators of forced labour are familiar. What changes is where they appear, and who encounters them: increasingly immigration authorities, company registration systems, criminal justice units and financial institutions.
Recommendations
The briefing paper recommends assessing the person rather than the setting, screening for trafficking where people are already encountered, including in detention, removal and criminal processing, and following the money according to the form an operation takes. It also argues that responses should be measured by networks disrupted and outcomes for the people affected, rather than by the number of sites closed.
Read the full briefing paper, Adapting to Place: How Scam Trafficking Integrates into Local Criminal Economies.
