Mobile Payments Providers, Others Join to Fight Human Trafficking

Sometimes we say, with a note of pride in our voices, that there’s nothing we can’t buy with mobile payments. Of course, most of the time, we mean this as a measure of achievement. From books to toys to tools to even land, our mobile payments mechanisms are right there to help. Sometimes, this takes on a darker meaning, as evidenced by recent moves on the part of mobile payments providers and other financial institutions to help stop human trafficking by focusing on the money.

The new effort is a combined effort by the Thomson Reuters foundation, who tipped us off about this, and the United States Banks Alliance, a coalition of several banks and other financial institutions, featuring such names as American Express, Bank of America, PayPal, Wells Fargo and several others.

The end result of this cooperative effort was a toolkit geared toward addressing human trafficking worldwide, which currently accounts for around 40.3 million people. That’s based on estimates from the Walk Free Foundation and the International Labour Organization. The exact contents of the toolkit are unclear, as the item is set to be “…shared on a confidential basis with financial institutions, expert anti-trafficking NGOs, and other key stakeholders,” the reports note. Other reports suggest it depends on the substantial amount of data financial institutions generate to spot “red flags.”

Though it’s a safe bet to say that no one outside of human traffickers actually believes that human trafficking should be a thing—seriously, does anyone think this is a good idea?—the toolkit’s capabilities are so vague that the whole thing is a bit unnerving. Is this the kind of thing where regular people’s operations are unnecessarily scrutinized looking for the human trafficker boogeyman under every bed, much in the same way Know Your Customer goes looking for money launderer boogeymen? Or is this something that might actually be useful? It’s not like anyone’s got transactions going to “Live Human Slave Mart”, so it seems like the program will make a lot of inferences, and how many of these will end up wrong?

We all want human trafficking stopped, and if this toolkit does that job, then that’s great. The collateral damage from the toolkit, though, is what should be concerning.