Tracking Human Traffickers

On the Trail of Human Traffickers

Spears Business researcher targets illegal trade with data analytics

Oklahoma State University’s Dr. Miriam McGaugh is an expert in analyzing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns within it.

While an epidemiologist for the Oklahoma State Department of Health, she used health care data to create community public health initiatives. Now, the assistant professor of professional practice in business analytics in the Spears School of Business is taking on the scourge of human trafficking in the United States.

For the last five years, McGaugh has explored ways to use internet data to trace the traffickers of victims forced into prostitution. Her research, conducted with colleagues from Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama, has developed ways to identify patterns in the use of phone numbers and images in online ads for sexual services that may indicate human trafficking.

“Everywhere we go and almost everything we do leaves digital footprints, especially on the internet,” McGaugh said. “We’re using data analytics to examine human trafficking patterns found in millions of publicly available online ads.”

In the U.S., human trafficking is often viewed as an international problem that occasionally makes headlines with the discovery of domestic workers or manual laborers in other countries forced to work against their will. But the global trade in humans also harms millions of people coerced into sex work and is a major issue in the U.S., where a flourishing trade exists in people, including minors, forced to work as prostitutes.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report, “Victims originate from almost every region of the world; the top three countries of origin of federally identified victims in [fiscal year] 2018 were the United States, Mexico and the Philippines.”

The U.S. Department of Justice reported that law enforcement agencies identified nearly 4,000 confirmed victims of sex and labor trafficking in the U.S. during investigations from fiscal year 2017-2018, and that 76 percent of those victims were U.S. citizens and 42 percent were under the age of 18. According to the United Nations, an estimated 4.8 million people worldwide were forced to work in the sex trade in 2016.

McGaugh joined a research project started at LSU in 2016 to see if contact phone numbers in online ads for adult services could provide clues about the people placing the ads. McGaugh, LSU’s Dr. James Van Scotter and Alabama’s Dr. Denise McManus used “web-scraping” software to capture text from nearly 700,000 classified ads on the website Backpage.com. The site was one of the largest sources for sex trade ads in the country until 2018, when the FBI shut it down.

Data from the ads, including phone numbers and categories such as escort services, adult entertainment, massage parlors and recruiting, were added to a huge database for analysis. The researchers theorize contact numbers in ads provide clues to whether the ad is for legal adult businesses like strip clubs or illegal activity like prostitution. Traffickers often hide their ads from police internet searches using code words, slang, misspellings and abbreviations to foil the use of search terms. Though sex ads are easy enough to find online, investigating their sources is difficult.

McGaugh’s research has shown that the lifespan and movement of phone numbers across ads can indicate the solicitation of customers for prostitution. A number tied to illegal activity is rarely used for more than a month or two before what is probably a “burner” phone is tossed. And phone numbers that appear in multiple ads associated with multiple escorts and in different regions of the country suggest a trafficking network.

The research team’s initial work in 2016 to collect online ad data was limited to 28 cities in Louisiana and the southeastern United States. In 2017, the study was expanded when data was pulled from 3 million Backpage.com ads covering 570 locations in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Phone number lifespan and category data were available for 7,275 numbers, 90 percent of which were for escorts.

Along with phone numbers, McGaugh and her colleagues also focused on photos and images in ads such as sexually suggestive emojis and emoticons, which can identify traffickers’ behavioral characteristics.

In 2019, McGaugh created a future tool for law enforcement when she worked with OSU student computer programmers to develop a mobile app called Break the Chain. While it’s still under development, the app will allow investigators to search through the database for phone numbers and geographic location to narrow the scope of investigations. She added that app will be linked to a similar project in the United Kingdom that developed the STOP APP.

“We will be working with a group in the U.K. called Stop the Traffik because they have a community reporting component that we want to incorporate into our app, and they would like more U.S.-based data,” McGaugh said.

Dr. Miriam McGaugh

LEARN MORE

More information is available about Dr. Miriam McGaugh’s research and Break the Chain app development through the new Center for Social and Business Impact at Spears Business at scsbi@okstate.edu or by contacting McGaugh at Miriam.mcgaugh@okstate.edu. Information about human trafficking, including the warning signs of trafficking, is available at

humantraffickinghotline.org

or stopthetraffik.org/spotthe-signs. Suspected trafficking can be reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.