Pedestrians walk past a Toronto International Film Festival sign in Toronto on Sept. 4.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Sex traffickers have the Toronto International Film Festival firmly in their sights.
Replete with glitz and glam, the annual festival draws in an estimated 700,000 attendees and drums up more than $114-million in economic activity, according to Toronto Global, the agency responsible for attracting business investment to the city.
Unfortunately, organized criminals are also finding ways to make money off of the buzz generated by TIFF. They are targeting the large crowds that gather for the marquee event to serve as clients for the city’s illicit flesh trade.
Financial crime investigators have long suspected that TIFF is a hot spot for sex trafficking. Now the Canada Anti-Human Trafficking Consortium (CAHTC) – a new initiative backed by businesses in the technology and financial-services sectors – is using data to prove it.
The brainchild of financial crime investigator Jinisha Bhatt, CAHTC was created so private-sector businesses could take an active role in the fight against human trafficking.
Canadian companies have new legal obligations to rid their supply chains of forced labour, which is one kind of human trafficking. But another lucrative form, which is the sexual exploitation of women and girls, is also creating operational, regulatory, legal and reputational risks for businesses in banking, telecommunications, technology, transportation, logistics, hospitality and health care.
The consortium aims to improve the victim-identification and prosecution rates – both of which are estimated to be under 1 per cent. It plans to do so, in part, by collecting and analyzing open-source data, specifically advertisements posted in online forums, to measure the sale of human beings in and around large-scale events, including TIFF.
“Traffickers have a vulnerability,” Ms. Bhatt explained. “They need to advertise their product. Ads are the greatest source of intel for law enforcement and financial institutions.”
The consortium’s financial crime investigators, who include a former FBI analyst, process real-time ad data to identify trafficking networks and to create intelligence packets for police, financial regulators and financial institutions.
So far, investigators have seen the number of daily online advertisements double since the beginning of TIFF. As of Tuesday, the team had scraped data from 12,387 advertisements on three sites since Aug 31.
(The Globe and Mail, which has been provided with the online ad data, is not identifying the websites or quoting from any of the ads. Doing either of those things risks encouraging illicit activity that harms vulnerable women and girls.)
In the four months ahead of TIFF, one website the consortium tracks was averaging roughly 27 posts a month, or about one new advertisement a day. So far in September, that same site is already averaging more than double that rate, with 16 advertisements in the first eight days of the month alone, Ms. Bhatt said.
Similarly, another website listed about 105 ads during the last two weeks of August. Investigators have already identified more than 170 advertisements in September, with more than 100 of them being listed this past Sunday alone, she added.
Investigators assign risk scores to ads by analyzing details including keywords, acronyms, emojis and other icons. They’ve found the sex traffickers targeting TIFF are using less obvious language than those who made the Super Bowl their mark earlier this year.
“It was so much more conspicuous when they said, ‘Super Bowl special.’ Here, they are not saying that,” Ms. Bhatt explained.
To assist my review of the data and reporting for this column, the consortium provided a 26-page guide of common acronyms, codes and terms and a separate two-page document to outline keywords that indicate sexual exploitation and third-party control.
Keywords indicating the sale of services include “donation,” “roses” and “Jacks.”
It gets worse.
Growing heart emojis are code for “young girl” while cherries and cherry blossoms are the signs for “minor.” An airplane emoji indicates movement, especially the arrival of minors. Crown emojis, meanwhile, are used to convey that a pimp is controlling a minor.
In other words, customers are knowingly purchasing sexual services from enslaved people, including children. Some of this criminal activity occurs at sex parties that coincide with large-scale events or at illicit massage businesses that operate throughout Toronto.
“If you’re going to bring a bunch of famous folks from all around the world for a film festival, you’re going to bring together people who have very poor choices in what entertainment can look like,” said Sharmila Wijeyakumar, chief operating officer of Rahab’s Daughters, a non-profit organization that combats human trafficking. The charity is partnering with CAHTC for the TIFF initiative.
“It’s the after-parties, it’s the before-parties,” she added.
TIFF, which is not part of CAHTC, did not respond to a request for comment.
Minerva, a financial crime risk assessment platform, is among those businesses facilitating the consortium’s work.
“We have no shot in hell of identifying victims in real-time or have any opportunity to intervene or interdict if we can’t move faster,” said Jennifer Arnold, who is co-founder and CEO of Minerva and one of CAHTC’s board members.
Other businesses can help by providing volunteers or other forms of support. TIFF, of course, is not the only large-scale event that is believed to be exploited by traffickers. Others include the Calgary Stampede and the Montreal Grand Prix.
Law enforcement can’t do it alone. Corporate Canada has the power to put these criminals out of business once and for all.