Astrid, a 28-year-old Colombian, lived in her country with her mother, with two younger brothers in her care. Precarity reigned in his home. Through Facebook, she met Dragos, a Bulgarian settled in Spain, with whom she established a long-distance relationship. Dragos claims that he is very interested in formalizing the relationship and offers to travel to Spain to be together and work on household chores or childcare.
Astrid traveled with the instructions of a certain Dragos, who was responsible for organizing and paying all the expenses arising from the trip. Once in Spain, nothing was as it seemed. Dragos had faked the romantic relationship and was not the person he had led her to believe he was to the young woman, who now owes Dragos a substantial debt.
With no money and no documentation (it was taken from her), Astrid was subjected by Dragos and a compatriot to exploitation for criminal activities. After 6 months, and after accumulating several criminal cases and an expulsion order, Astrid finally managed to be cared for by a specialized organization, Projecte Esperança.
This organization and the Red Cross warn of the “significant change” in the way of capturing victims of trafficking through social networks and the digital environment. Something that Projecte Esperança and Sicar Cat already warned in the office of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.
In their contributions to the Report on the use of technology to facilitate and prevent contemporary forms of slavery, they indicated that “in recent years, especially since the pandemic caused by covid, we have seen how the new technologies have acquired a greater role in the framework of Trafficking in Human Beings, and how their use by traffickers, both in the capture and exploitation phases, has spread exponentially”.
How? The use of new technologies for the capture of trafficking victims makes it possible to catch a greater number of people regardless of geographical borders. Traffickers (who can be individuals or organized groups) use the so-called hunting strategy, which is characterized by a proactive trafficker pursuing victims online. This is done either by gaining the victims’ trust through feigning romantic relationships or friendships, for example through social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, or by responding with fictitious job offers to the job demands of digital job search platforms where fake jobs are advertised, point out from Projecte Esperança. A modus operandi confirmed by Irene Sotelo, from the Human Trafficking Unit of the Red Cross.
In addition, traffickers also use new technologies to subjugate victims and intimidate, threaten and coerce them, for example, with the possibility of spreading compromising content for them among family members, contacts and publicly, of in a way that exposes them and violates their privacy.
The oenagés ensure that these forms of recruitment are used for trafficking for the purposes of labor exploitation in the cleaning and domestic service sector, for the purposes of labor exploitation in the agricultural sector, trafficking for the purposes of labor exploitation in the hospitality industry , for forced criminality and for trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation (which include cases of prostitution and cases of sexual slavery for the benefit of an individual trafficker), point out from Project Esperança.