The campaign against human trafficking is gaining ground within the crypto space with the launch of a consortium of cryptocurrencies by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII) last month.
Crypto leaders will form and share standardized information related to human trafficking. Created since January of this year, ATII has been able to curate initiatives and provide resources to organizations including high-risk trafficking data that can be leveraged through any transaction monitoring, sanctions, or onboarding technology.
Fight against human trafficking
Human trafficking is a very evil crime that takes place globally. The consortium’s objective is to fight against human trafficking by using data from cryptocurrency transactions.
Aaron Kahler, the founder of the association, has said that the purpose of the association is for all in the space to have access to standardized data. He added:
We’ve seen a lot of data on drug trafficking, crime, terrorist financing, ransomware and more, but the world doesn’t have enough information on human trafficking.There is so much of this going on in today’s dark market, a place where we also see a lot of crypto transactions happening.
Kahler is cooperating with intelligence organizations to help alleviate the suffering caused by human trafficking. He believes that child exploitation and sex trafficking are not taken very seriously. These crimes are a scourge that is as old as sex but gaining more adherents due to crypto payment secrecy.
The darknet market has been implicated and with good reason. Selling people in the 21st century is regarded as one of the highest sources of organized criminal income. Payment through crypto exchanges helps avoids detection.
Human trafficking operations are highly organized and can go wholesale to maximize profit like in the case of 3,200 Yazidi women kidnapped in Sinjar, August 2014.
Objective of ATCC
ATCC’s (Anti-Trafficking Crypto Consortium) main objective is to be able to supply information to law enforcement agencies on human trafficking and child abuse. In an interview, Kahler said that they are starting the conversation within the association through building typological identifiers and other modes of investigation.
He challenged those in the industry to take collective action against human traffickers as their corporate responsibility. The logical move is to follow the crypto trail in transactions involving sexual exploitation, labor exploitation, domestic servitude, forced marriage, forced criminality, child soldiers, organ harvesting, and a host of other heinous crimes of using humans against their will.
Aaron Kahler’s profile delineates his qualifications for taking the helm of ATII. He has help from CipherTrace, a cryptocurrency, and blockchain tracing security company. CipherTrace’s director of financial investigation and education, Pamela Clegg, who also doubles as a former officer of the U.S intelligence, serves as an adviser to the ATII’s advisory board.
Crypto is often associated with criminal activities that place the community’s privacy in jeopardy. To prevent centralized agencies from intruding into decentralized space, the ATCC can help the community redeem itself by exposing scalawags using crypto as a tool for their criminal activities.
