Tech For Good Rally Results Hosted by Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative

The Results are in for the High-Risk Human Trafficking Tech & Data Rally Hosted by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative

---

Wilmington, NC, November 22, 2022 – Major global financial institutions participated in the High-Risk Human Trafficking Tech & Data Rally hosted by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII). This two-day event enabled financial institutions and other commercial organizations to leverage high-risk human trafficking tools to cross reference against their customer/transaction database, identify anomalies, investigate and provide findings to appropriate law enforcement and regulatory bodies. Participating institutions utilized only a subset of ATII’s public facing High Risk Human Trafficking (HRHT) data, which is over 1.3 million rows of data spread across 140 countries.  Each institution produced substantial and surprising results. In the USA, many were able to detect up to 100 hits per state per financial institution.

---

ATII has found that this unique method of gathering data related to potential trafficking risk and cross referencing it against customer or transactional records is an effective approach to leverage with the customary transaction monitoring that financial institutions and companies routinely perform. The HRHT dataset will yield potential “hits” for high-risk activity, generate a red flag, trigger the enhanced due diligence and allow companies to investigate with more context. If unusual activity is noted following review of the alerted accounts/transactions, institutions may file a Suspicious Activity/Transaction Report (SAR/STR) on the related activity, which automatically is sent to FinCEN (USA) / FinTRAC (Canada). Even at the peak in 2020, there were 15,814 SAR’s filed during the year. When you divide that by 365 days per year, you find that there were only 43 SAR’s filed per day. That means that there is less then 1 SAR filed per day, per state. With at least one bank in each city, that number is not very impressive. We can do better.

---

The Tech for Good Rally’s tech and data partners, Nomino Data, Giant Oak, Senzing, and Vital4 provided technology free of charge to participating organizations like Truist, Royal Bank of Canada, Synchrony, PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and others. Moneygram International, ACGCS, TCAE, and ManchesterCF were also supporting sponsors of the event.

---

“I couldn’t be happier with the results that the participants produced. The team at ATII continues to perform extensive #OSINT investigations to validate the results, in order to create actionable intelligence. We had one financial institution collaborator recently inform us that they had 4100+ hits from our HRHT data set within their organization. That’s just one company.” – states Larry Cameron, Chief Information and Security Officer at Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative.

---

 “This Tech for Good Rally really has opened the floodgates for other financial institutions to follow suit, after hearing about the enormous impact this makes on the lives of the most vulnerable in their local area.” – states Aaron Kahler, Founder and CEO of Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative. “As public and private organizations continue to collaborate in the creation of a uniform front within the financial sector to fight human trafficking, we will see a true impact in the recovery of victims and prosecution of traffickers.”

---

The use of technology can enable exploitation or create opportunity. The future success in eradicating human trafficking will depend on how law enforcement, tech companies, the criminal justice systems, financial institutions, retail stores, and others can collectively leverage technology to create positive social impact. ATII hopes to disrupt the operations, economics and anonymity of human trafficking at the source by intervening in criminal access to financial markets with events similar to the Tech for Good Rally. Red flag and indicators of human trafficking documents can be downloaded HERE for reference.