Sergei/Mario needs to pay cash for condoms:
British bank 'identifying trafficked sex workers by tracking contraceptive spending'
Evening Standard 15 March
A British bank is helping to identify women trafficked here to work as prostitutes by monitoring customers’ accounts for daily purchases of contraceptives, a new report has revealed.
The same unnamed bank has also been looking for payments to “high end restaurants and cheap diners on the same day” in the belief that such transactions could indicate a sex worker dining with a client while her “handler” eats more frugally nearby.
Another financial institution provided 80 tip-offs to law enforcers after identifying accounts which received multiple cash deposits of under £10,000, often paid in anonymously, as well as regular payments to websites advertising “adult services” and flights to Eastern European countries known for sex trafficking.
The new tactics were revealed in a report published today by the Royal United Services Institute at a conference on trafficking attended by Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Britain’s independent anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland.
Ms Rudd used the event to announce a £6 million investment in projects to combat modern slavery around the world.
Ten organisations will use the money to perform tasks including stopping child slavery in factories overseas that send goods to Britain and raise awareness of the trafficking problem in “key hotspots” abroad.
The most eye-catching disclosure today, however, came in a section of the report detailing the work that British financial institutions are already playing in tackling trafficking.
The report warns that the complexity of the problem, which includes trafficking for labour exploitation and domestic servitude as well as prostitution, can make it hard for the financial services industry to identify illicit activity.
But it cites two examples where British financial institutions have already helped to identify suspected traffickers or their victims, including one bank which is looking for daily payments to chemists that might indicate repeated purchases of contraceptives.
The results of this monitoring were then “segregated by geography, age and nationality to determine which accounts were worthy of greater analysis” before a decision was made as to whether to alert law enforcers to suspected trafficking activity.
The report concludes by urging other financial institutions to assist the fight against modern slavery and that there are “moral, legal, economic and commercial” reasons to do so.”
