CipherTrace, one of the leading crypto cybersecurity firms in the industry, has partnered with the newly formed Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII) to combat human trafficking.
Leading the effort is Pamela Clegg, the current director of financial investigations and education at CipherTrace. She will be supplemented by the advisory board of ATII, a conglomerate of veterans with significant experience in anti-human trafficking field. The new partnership entails cracking down on money laundering and illicit activities that involve cryptocurrencies to carry out human trafficking.
CipherTrace has been working in the space of cybersecurity and digital currency ever since it was formed in 2015. It was founded by leading cybersecurity experts from Silicon Valley with expertise in eCrime, payment frauds, banking and encryption. Since then, CipherTrace has been able to build sophisticated models to create accurate money trail for encrypted transactions. The validity of their methods can be attested from the fact that leading tech giants hire services from CipherTrace to perform cybersecurity diagnostics.
With the new partnership, CipherTrace will be granting access rights to ATII to use the user-interface of its software. The tool can enable the ATII to track illicit digital currency transactions and thereby stopping criminal organizations from accessing anonymous funds to foster their illicit activities.
Clegg, who is in charge of the new collaboration, has underscored the severity of the problem at hand and has urged stakeholders to step into action before it’s too late. She has equated human trafficking with modern day slavery which is based on fraud and coercion to obtain some form of manual labor on an industrial scale. The heinous crimes can range from sex trafficking to child labor.
She stated:
“Millions of men, women, and children are trafficked in countries around the world. It’s not enough anymore just to say no to human trafficking. We must be proactive, aggressive and go after those facilitating, engaging in and benefiting from trafficked persons.”
Clegg believes that one way to stop these illicit activities is to create an accurate money trail and stop the traffickers right at the source of the money trail. “Money is the most effective way to combat this global crime.”
Modern-Day Slavery Exploiting Crypto
According to data from the International Labor Organization, approximately 40 million people have been lost to modern-day slavery. The nexus of this criminal activity has a commercial value of $150 billion.
Modern day human traffickers have begun to rely on sophisticated methods to operate without being noticed; these include performing transactions in cryptocurrency. By exploiting the unique attributes of digital currencies, transactions are virtually untraceable, and criminals leverage this idea to hide from the authorities.
In this regard, CipherTrace is certainly engaged in a commendable and worthy mission, even if it’s on the expense of anonymity (and we can all agree that such horrendous criminals don’t deserve it).
