New York City, US
Thomson Reuters Foundation
PayPal Holdings Inc will share its financial data with a leading advocacy group in the United States to try and stop human traffickers from moving funds on the digital money transfer platform.
Human traffickers often force people into modern slavery which generates around $US150 billion a year in illegal profits, according to the International Labour Organization.
A pedestrian walks past the PayPal logo at an office building in Berlin, Germany, on 5th March, 2019. PICTURE: Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch
Banks and other financial institutions are under pressure to stop traffickers from laundering cash and, last week, anti-trafficking group, Polaris, said it would work with Paypal to identify red flag transactions.
The scheme will identify “those who profit off of the exploitation of others and provide actionable information to law enforcement,” Sara Crowe, director of Polaris’s strategic initiative on financial systems, said in a statement.
More than 40 million people are enslaved around the world, according to the ILO, in sexual exploitation and marriages they did not consent to and in places including homes and factories.
Rights groups have pushed for greater collaboration between governments, companies and non-profits to tighten the noose on traffickers.
“PayPal and Polaris coming together is a great example of private and non-profit entities joining forces to achieve a positive social impact that neither party could fully realize on their own,” said Aaron Karczmer, Paypal’s chief risk officer.
Trafficking experts applauded the announcement.
“Human trafficking exists for one simple reason: profit,” Luis C.deBaca, former US anti-trafficking ambassador-at-large, said in a statement.
“Working with financial institutions to understand how traffickers use their services has the potential to…make exploitation more risky and therefore less profitable,” he said.
Last year, dozens of banks signed up to a United Nations program to offer trafficking survivors accounts and debit cards, tools they may lack if their captor stole their financial identity or ruined their credit.
Ending modern slavery is among the targets of the 17 global goals adopted by the 193 member nations of the UN three years ago to promote such issues as gender equality and sustainable energy and end poverty, inequality and other world woes by 2030.
