Human Trafficking in the Era of COVID-19

The ACAMS Today magazine is a quarterly publication for career-minded professionals in the financial crime detection and prevention fields and it is an exclusive benefit for ACAMS members. The ACAMS Today is dedicated to keeping members up to date on the latest anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing challenges, legislative, regulatory and international developments in financial crime prevention and practical solutions to compliance problems.

This article covers the emerging trends in human trafficking since the onset of COVID-19. Human trafficking has continued to evolve, creating a new wave of victims and revictimization of those already exploited. Global school closures during the pandemic forced children to stay home, increasing their vulnerability to exploitation. Reports of online exploitation (images and videos) to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children doubled in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. The article details the latest troubling details regarding child sexual exploitation, cryptocurrency being used to pay for online sex content (legal and illegal), and the exploitation of COVID-19 relief programs by human traffickers. Thus, financial industry professionals must work with other actors to understand the crime better and adjust typologies and indicators as needed in order to combat this heinous crime.