"Many of the deals are happening in plain sight. Cryptocurrency's frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view."
"According to the firm's analysis, based largely on tracing across blockchains the cryptocurrency those criminal operations use, researchers found that crypto transactions for human trafficking grew at least 85 percent year over year. The total amount of those transactions, Chainalysis says, is now at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually-though it declined to give an exact number for that sales total because it considered its measurements to be a conservative estimate that likely undercounts the true scale of the issue."
Cryptocurrency's low-fee, transnational payments enabled buyers to purchase victims for prostitution and scam compounds, fueling industrialized exploitation. Crypto-funded transactions tied to forced labor in Southeast Asian scam compounds and sex-trafficking prostitution rings increased at least 85% year over year in 2025. The annual total of those transactions is at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars, a conservative estimate that likely undercounts the true scale. Many operations were linked to Chinese-speaking criminal groups advertising on Telegram, including "guarantee" black markets. Borderless cryptocurrency payments and public listings have allowed trafficking networks to scale with relative impunity.
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