Spotlight on AI: Finding hidden trafficking victims
A 14-year-old Florida girl who was suspected of being abused by her stepfather was placed in foster care, but the child repeatedly ran away to live with her 23-year-old “boyfriend.” For more than two years, there were few leads about her whereabouts.
Then last year, a team of analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) used an evolving technology called Spotlight and found a possible match with an online escort ad. Our analysts contacted law enforcement, and they sprang into action. Investigators with the Miami-Dade Police Department found the child and arrested her trafficker.
“Children being sold by traffickers are often trapped behind a hotel door where they rarely interact with the outside world, other than the buyers who purchase them to abuse,” said Melissa Snow, executive director of NCMEC’s child sex trafficking programs. “Spotlight literally kicks down that door.”
Melissa Snow, who oversees NCMEC’s child-sex trafficking programs, discusses trends and available resources at a training for law-enforcement. (Photo by Sarah Baker)
When child sex traffickers moved from the streets to the internet to sell kids for sex – the way most children are trafficked today – our analysts began trying to help law enforcement recover them by visually comparing missing children reported to us with those featured in online escort ads.
But to evade detection, traffickers often move children from state to state every few days and disguise children in online escort ads with aliases and makeup to look older. They intersperse phone numbers with letters, making it difficult for law enforcement to search for them.
That meant our analysts had to search through hundreds of online escort ads, on dozens of sites, and new postings were constantly being added. By the time they’d find a possible match, the child had already been moved again.
In response, Spotlight is leveraging AI-powered technology to dramatically decrease the time it takes to find missing children in online ads, some of whom are sold many times in a single day. Moreover, Spotlight helps our analysts develop possible locations in real time for law enforcement to search for children suffering unimaginable abuse and to apprehend their traffickers.
A non-profit organization that partners with NCMEC, Spotlight uses this technology to compare escort ads with missing children on our website for possible matches. These matches are then reported to NCMEC as possible leads in the missing child case. Spotlight also searches vast amounts of data quickly to help our analysts identify relevant information about where these children may be in real time.
“Spotlight is a lifeline for children being sold in online escort ads,” said Snow. “A positive match gives law enforcement an actionable lead that can result in the recovery of a child, sometimes within 24 hours.”
Last year alone, Spotlight compared NCMEC’s missing child data with escort ads, generating 541 positive matches in these cases, including children no one suspected of being trafficked. Our analysts then verified whether that was the missing child and, if so, sent it to law enforcement. The youngest child was only 12 years old.
“Our goal is to reduce the time it takes to identify a child whose ad has just been posted online from months to minutes,” said Kristin Boorse, CEO of Spotlight. “These are the missing kids people aren’t looking for. We’re humbled by the progress that has been made – but we won’t stop until every child is found.”
Spotlight was developed as a prototype and first used during the February 2015 Super Bowl to identify children being sold for sex online during the sporting event, Boorse said. After initial success, Spotlight continued to evolve over the years and was offered to law enforcement free of charge from the generous support of donors.
Boorse said the idea for Spotlight was born 10 years ago after discussions with law enforcement and how they conduct child sex trafficking investigations. What we learned was that technology was being used by child sex traffickers but had yet to play a role in combatting trafficking, she said. The success of the initial prototype proved that technology could be used to fight trafficking.
“The enduring partnership between NCMEC and Spotlight represents powerful alliance in the fight against child trafficking, combining NCMEC's expertise and reach with Spotlight's innovative technology,” Boorse said.
Spotlight has become a vital tool for law enforcement in the U.S. and Canada, where limited resources make it challenging to combat the explosion of child sexual exploitation online. The internet provides traffickers with increased anonymity, making it even harder to locate and recover victims. Over the last decade, Spotlight has helped law enforcement identify more than 26,000 trafficked children.
(To learn how you can help spot child sex trafficking, visit https://ncmec.org/blog/2024/child-sex-trafficking-know-the-signs.)