"A set of sophisticated tools will help financial institutions uncover profits from human trafficking - estimated at $150 billion per year - that are moving through their systems, an anti-trafficking coalition said on Thursday.
Tools to detect suspicious transactions will allow companies to more easily spot traffickers using their banking or money-moving services to handle profits, said organizers of United States Banks Alliance.
More than 40 million people were enslaved around the world as of 2016, according to an estimate by the Walk Free Foundation and the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO).
Human traffickers play a key role in forcing many people into slavery, which includes work in homes and factories, sexual exploitation and marriages they did not consent to.
The human trafficking industry reaps some $150 billion each year in illegal profits, according to the ILO.
...Financial records can be powerful weapons in prosecuting traffickers, especially when survivors find it too difficult to be strong witnesses in court, New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
'This kind of gathering of hard data, it shows dollar movement and who owns the credit cards, these kinds of things are the circumstantial and direct evidence, hard evidence that helps build these cases,' Vance said."
