Traffickers using cyberspace to lure victims

While technology has transformed the way in which the world connects, it has also created new opportunities for traffickers to exploit vulnerable individuals online.

Sherese Smith, senior special agent at the Major Organised Crime and Anti Corruption Agency, said children remain one of the most vulnerable groups as it relates to human trafficking.

“When we are speaking of the cyberspace, children are very exposed and they are using all of the sites and we find that the ones that are geared especially towards children that there are predators communicating with them on these sites. They will start a conversation to learn about them and then in the evidence we see where they will request videos and pictures from these children,” she said.

“Those images and videos are usually intimate ones and they are then used to blackmail the children. They will tell them that they will send the images to their parents if they don’t give them more. These offenders take what they receive from the children and share them to an international reach for monetary gain,” Smith said, adding that offenders sometimes use artificial intelligence to create more images

Smith was among attendees at the third staging in the Conversations on Trafficking series, hosted by the Office of the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons (ONRTIP) on Friday. It was held in observance of World Day against Trafficking in Persons 2026. This year’s conversation, under the theme ‘The Digital Trap: Understanding Cyber Trafficking’, examined how traffickers use social media, online gaming and other digital platforms to recruit and exploit victims, especially children, and ways in which persons can help to prevent this crime.

Smith noted that the matters are not always reported with urgency by the parents.

“A lot of way in which these crimes are discovered is when investigations are being done on other crimes. We may be doing a search on a financial crime and we find the evidence of human trafficking,” she said.

Human trafficking is a multibillion-dollar criminal industry whereby traffickers generate profits from the exploitation of millions of people worldwide. It contains three elements – the act of recruiting individuals through the means of force, fraud, or coercion for the person of exploitation. Diahann Gordon Harrison, Jamaica’s rapporteur on tracking in persons, said cyber trafficking occurs when the Internet, including social media platforms, is used to facilitate the exploitation of a person.

“It doesn’t involve movement necessarily. The truth is that you can be trafficked in your own home and a space where you willingly went to, because trafficking is simply a behaviour where one human thinks they have the right to dictate how another human being is supposed to behave and to be used in their gain, whether it is for some advantage or for monetary gain,” she said.

Andrew Anderson, CEO of cybersecurity firm The 4n6 Analyst, implored parents to monitor their children’s online activities as

“A lot of parents don’t even know that you can dictate the email address [you use] when creating a social media account. You can set restrictions on those emails as well as monitor the app to prevent certain things from happening as well as maintaining access on the same platforms that your children are using,” Anderson said.

He also lamented the existence of the ‘dark web’ where illicit activities are done “whether it is organs for sale, humans for sale and whether it is a specific demographic, age type or gender that they are asking for”.

“In some cases, they will outright say that they are looking for slaves whether it is online or real life,” he said.