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How artificial intelligence is transforming the global battle against human trafficking
A taste:
[FoxNews] Each year, human trafficking generates more than $150 billion in profits – at the expense of human life – with children accounting for around a third of its victims. It’s a practice that operates underground in almost every country on the planet, and despite the resources thrown at it -- by law enforcement, non-governmental organizations, social media campaigns – it only seems to grow.

Experts on the topic say the tools used in even in the most developed societies fall far short of what is needed to put a dent in this grim and growing enterprise.

But artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)? Those could change the game.

“Anytime you have to ingest large amounts of data and information, you try to identify trends and patterns, and it can be very difficult to do well,” Alma Angotti, a former U.S. regulation official for the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority told Fox News. “Typically, it has been a rules-based system – like flagging transactions over a certain amount such or with a certain amount of frequency. The problem with that is you can’t identify patterns and problems.”

AI and ML, Angotti said, have the power to analyze more than just financial activity.

“It can highlight social, economic and even political conditions from hundreds of thousands of sources,” she said. “For example, law enforcement can look at young women of a certain age entering the country from certain high-risk jurisdictions. Marry that up with social media and young people missing from home, or people associated with a false employment agency or who think they are getting a nanny job, and you start to develop a complete picture. And the information can be brought up all at once, rather than an analyst having to go through the Dark Web.”

Despite the potential, for now those tools remain underused, Angotti said.

QuantaVerse CEO and founder David McLaughlin said that while small steps are having a significant impact, there is much more that can be done. Artificial intelligence can follow the money created by human trafficking operations. That means that instead of identifying only lower-level human traffickers, the “beneficial owners” or kingpins of these operations can be discovered, he said.

“AI is better at finding suspicious financial activity than legacy technology alone. Today, banks are required by regulators to report unusual banking activity by filing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to FinCEN. To do this, banks’ anti-money laundering (AML) teams currently rely on antiquated, rules-based Transaction Monitoring Systems (TMS),” McLaughlin explained. “Suspicious transactions are ‘flagged’ by the TMS and handed over to human investigators to determine if a flag should be reported to the authorities.

" Unfortunately, 95 percent of the flags produced by the TMS systems are benign and waste vital investigative resources. Even worse, TMS systems are missing crimes that are going through the banking system undiscovered.”
Posted by: Skidmark 2019-09-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=551400