Financial Crime in Plain Sight: Human Trafficking Through the Lens of Financial Institutions

On July 28, FinScan hosted an invitation-only FinCrime Forum on human trafficking, bringing together survivor, law enforcement, and financial services perspectives to examine a crime type that consistently falls outside the typologies financial institutions are built to detect.

The panel included Alina Donahue, a survivor leader who works with Operation Light Shine to support law enforcement's anti-trafficking efforts; Supervisory Special Agent Taylor Dervish of the FBI, whose career has focused on child exploitation and related crimes; Bryan Kimbell, Chief Human Trafficking Investigator with the Atlanta Attorney General's Office, who has spent his career combating trafficking, primarily of children; and Becki LaPorte of FinScan, who brings decades of financial services experience fighting human trafficking, including direct work with survivors.

The discussion centered on the lived experience of a survivor who described not only her trafficking journey but how it evolved into forced criminality, ultimately leading to her arrest. She has since had her record expunged and is now a leader in the anti-trafficking movement. Law enforcement panelists shared specific case examples involving children, noting that while at-risk children are frequent targets, any child can become a victim and it is often through someone they already trust, such as a family member or mentor.

From a financial services standpoint, the panel was direct: trafficking, sex crimes, forced labor, and sextortion do not follow the typologies institutions are calibrated to catch. Fraud and money laundering dominate monitoring programs, while the transaction patterns behind trafficking remain largely invisible to the systems built to find them.

Key Takeaways

The Public Perception of Trafficking Is Largely Wrong

Popular depictions of abduction and force are the exception, not the rule. Traffickers more often cultivate a relationship, identify a victim's vulnerabilities, and exploit them over time. Many victims believe they are in a genuine relationship and are acting to please their partner. This means it is not uncommon for someone to remain unaware they were trafficked until years after leaving the trafficker.

The Scale Is Larger and More Hidden Than Most Institutions Assume

The Atlanta FBI field office alone processes roughly 43,000 child trafficking cases a year, and one panelist noted their office fields four calls a day from parents. That figure only reflects the parents who know to call. An unknown and likely much larger population of cases goes unreported. Sextortion is a growing subset of this problem: young teens, most often boys, are manipulated into sharing explicit images with someone posing as a romantic interest but who is part of a criminal network. The demands for payment that follow are frequently more than victims can meet, and cases have ended in the victim's suicide.

Institutions Are Well-Built to Catch Fraud But Not This

Trafficking-related transactions are typically small dollar, don't involve high-risk customers, and rarely trigger alerts in existing monitoring systems. Teen checking accounts, often treated as inherently low risk, carry heightened exploitation risk that most institutions haven't accounted for. The panel's message to financial institutions: build trafficking-specific typologies into monitoring programs and recognize that transactions too small to affect the bottom line can still be the clearest signal of a serious underlying crime.

Why It Matters

Human trafficking sits at the intersection of financial crime and human harm in a way few other typologies do. Institutions that calibrate detection solely to transaction value will continue to miss it because the signal doesn't look like the fraud and laundering patterns compliance programs are built around. Closing that gap starts with recognizing trafficking as its own typology, not a subset of an existing one.