Sexually exploited or forced into labour, crime, begging or marriage. Every year, tens of thousands of men, women and children are coerced or tricked into these abuses and more, with vulnerable people, including children, the poor and refugees, often hardest hit.
INTERPOL Spotlight focuses on the fight against a form of organized crime built around disregard for human safety and dignity.
Fueled by poverty, conflict or climate change and driven by organized crime groups’ endless appetite for profits, human trafficking affects all regions of the world. After a significant drop in 2020, by 2023 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that numbers worldwide had surged back to above pre-pandemic levels, with traffickers mainly targeting women and children, who together make up three quarters of their total recorded victims. Children alone account for 38 per cent. “We also know that human trafficking disproportionately affects the poor, migrants, refugees and other stateless persons,” says Ofelia Hough, Criminal Intelligence Officer with INTERPOL’s Vulnerable Communities unit. “Many of them may have already been displaced and are desperate for work or shelter, making them an easy target for traffickers.”
Psychological and physical harm
Once they have been trapped, victims are often moved across borders and held in what look like ordinary homes or forced to work in apparently legitimate businesses, on or offline. They may be passed on or sold to other criminal groups and some end up being held in a coercive situation for most or all of their lives. “The covert nature of human trafficking, with victims often hiding in plain sight makes it difficult to trace them and identify them as victims,” Ofelia Hough continues. “Many suffer psychological as well as physical harm and are reticent to engage with police when we do trace them, making the crimes difficult to investigate and bring to justice.”
A global network of partners and policing tools
INTERPOL’s specialist Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling team are dedicated to breaking this cycle of enslavement or coercive control wherever it is perpetrated. They work closely with colleagues in INTERPOL’s 196 member countries, as well as major global and regional partners such as the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Europol, Afripol and Frontex, and dozens of grassroots NGOs. Our secure communications systems can send data on traffickers, victims, new trafficking routes and more to all or selected member countries, including via our colour Notices. “These are widely recognized and acted on by law enforcement agencies around the world and play a major role in human trafficking investigations,” says Ofelia Hough. “Blue Notices are very important in gathering intelligence on suspects and their movements, while Yellow Notices help us send out alerts about missing persons, Red Notices can lead to the arrest of named suspects and Silver Notices help trace the illegal profits that are the criminals’ main motivation.”
Alerting on the emergence of scam centres
But it was a Purple Notice – warning of a new criminal modus operandi – and later an Orange Notice – warning of a serious threat to human safety - that made INTERPOL the first organization to alert the world to the rise and then the globalization of scam centres, the setting for an emerging, growing and shocking form of human trafficking.
In March 2022, during an INTERPOL-coordinated operation in South East Asia, officers began to receive reports that nationals of several countries in the region were being lured by fake job advertisements to scam centres in Cambodia. On arrival, instead of starting the promised job, they were forced to hand over their passports, locked up and made to send numerous online scam messages to potential victims or face punishment. By June 2022, INTERPOL had enough information to send out a Purple Notice detailing this new criminal method and in October 2022 published a first report on the phenomenon, drafted by Criminal Intelligence Analyst, Stephanie Baroud. “When I started delving deeper, I began to see that this was becoming a truly global issue,” she explains. “Victims were being tricked into travelling to scam centres in South East Asia from as far away as South America, Western Europe and Eastern Africa and we were also seeing cases of people being held in West Africa, as well as on a smaller scale in several European countries.”
From emerging crime to serious global threat
By June 2023, the rise of human trafficking to scam centres had escalated to a point where INTERPOL issued an Orange Notice, a global warning regarding a serious and imminent threat to public safety. By this stage, new scam centres had been reported in the Middle East and Central America and West Africa was developing into an emerging regional hub. Many scam centres were located in areas known for drugs and wildlife trafficking, raising concerns among INTERPOL and national police forces about potential links to existing organized crime networks. “There are signs of polycriminality around scam centres and we are also working closely with our colleagues specializing in drugs, arms and wildlife trafficking, as well as cyber and financial crime,” says Stephanie Baroud. “INTERPOL has become a recognized knowledge hub for this emerging form of crime and we are doing what we do best, from criminal analysis to data sharing and investigational and operational support, right through to facilitating the relaying of rescue messages to different countries in a bid to save some of the victims.” This November, our 93rd General Assembly adopted a resolution addressing this growing threat and highlighting the increased use of advanced technologies by criminals and the highly adaptive nature of these cross-border criminal networks requiring a coordinated global response.
Global operations
INTERPOL officers, their national counterparts and other partners also work to release victims from scam centres and other forms of human trafficking, as well as arresting the criminals holding them, during both national and global operations. Among them, Operation Liberterra grew from an initiative involving 47 countries in 2021 to one spanning 116 in 2024. The number of potential victims identified rose from 430 in 2021 to over 3,000 in 2024 and the number of arrests from 286 to over 2,000. During 2024’s Operation Liberterra II, police conducted raids, checked border points and flights and deployed to known trafficking and smuggling hotspots. Nearly 8 million checks were carried out against INTERPOL databases and arrests and rescues were made involving scam centres, fruit and vegetable farms, organ harvesting and migrant smuggling.
Bitter-sweet victory
Liberterra III 2025 took place over two weeks this November with 128 countries participating under INTERPOL’s coordination. “We are currently working with our colleagues in all those member countries to finalise the results,” says Ofelia Hough. “With so many countries involved, it will take time, but we are already confident that even more victims will have been rescued and criminals arrested. It’s a bitter-sweet victory for law enforcement,” she continues. “We are proud of what we and our colleagues are achieving in the fight against human trafficking, but we know that behind the numbers are human beings who have been treated like objects - bought, sold and often enslaved - and who may bear the mental scars for life.”