Takeaways from PwC’s Hackathon at ACAMS 2022: Join the fight to stop human trafficking

PwC’s Hackathon at the 2022 ACAMS conference in Hollywood, FL

This year we worked with ACAMS to sponsor a Hackathon at their conference in Hollywood, FL last week.?The theme of our hackathon was using rapid fire threat based analytics to quickly identify human trafficking trends in our data set.?Participants were given five days to work with synthetic data containing more than a million rows that included customer information, wires, cash and ATM Activity.?And we were blown away by the results!

Why did PwC sponsor the event??Human trafficking is the exploitation of people for commercial sex or for labor; it is modern-day slavery. It is an issue that plagues not only foreign countries, but also many communities within the United States. ?Females are disproportionately affected by forced labour, accounting for 99% of victims in the commercial sex industry, and 58% in other sectors. It generates well over $150B in illicit revenue for organized crime and other egregious actors and proceeds oft. en move through financial institutions.?

We believe together - with awareness, tools, and intelligence - more can be done to make an impact in reducing this societal concern. Whether through sophisticated graph and machine learning techniques or basic analytics in spreadsheets, there are major red flags that can be identified through analytics that can help identify potential suspects in this illicit trade. In our hackathon, we focused awareness related to red flags in the following areas:?

• Human traffickers use funnel accounts to transfer funds, move profits, and maintain anonymity. Once funnel accounts receive multiple cash deposits in an amount below the reporting threshold, the funds are quickly withdrawn in a different geographic area. Victims are coerced to wire proceeds via money services businesses to facilitate the funneling of proceeds.
• Customers appear to move through, and transact from, different geographic and high risk locations. These transactions can be combined with travel and transactions in and to foreign countries that are typically considered conduits for human trafficking
• Alternative payment methods also allow traffickers to advertise their services and potentially evade detection. In addition to cash, traffickers accept payments via credit cards, prepaid cards, mobile P2P payments, and convertible virtual currency.?

The teams participating were nothing short of incredible. Each group demonstrated multiple unique approaches and attacks -- each of them focused on how through purpose and innovation they quickly identified some or all elements of our hidden human trafficking data.?

"Detecting anomalous behavior in large quantities of data was key to identifying the network of events and actors in the human trafficking operation. Financial transactions indicated activities starting with visa and passport applications, through to travel tickets to secure movement of people across borders and finishing with money transfers related to the proceeds of the exploitation of trafficked people."

Congrats to Resistant AI and their team of Roger Walton, Kathy Gormly, Dean Locke for winning this year’s hackathon. And thank you to our judges, Jim Candelmo (Chief AML Officer, PNC Bank), Scott Nathan (Global Head of AML Transaction Monitoring, Citigroup) and Melissa Strait (Chief Compliance Officer, Coinbase) for volunteering their time.

How can you join the fight? There are so many resources to get started. A few resources we recommend reading to help you do more in your institution:?

• Report to congress on analysis of AML efforts related to human trafficking
• Guidance on Recognizing Activity that May be Associated with Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking — Financial Red Flags?
• Guidance on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings for the purpose of labor exploitation - Group of Experts on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings?
• FATF - Financial Flows from Human Trafficking?

For anyone interested in a deeper discussion on this topic, just send me a message and we’re happy to chat.?Whether it’s through enhanced risk assessments, ideas around analytics and dashboarding or how you can train your investigative workforce to spot the red flags.?

Contact us immediately or follow the new digital crime fighters instagram page - together, let’s move the needle and join the fight!?

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