Astrid, a 28-year-old Colombian, lived in her country with her mother, two brothers with dependent minors. Precariousness reigned in her home. Through Facebook, she met Dragos, a Bulgarian living in Spain with whom she entered into a long-distance sentimental relationship. Dragos claims to be very interested in formalizing the relationship and offers to travel to Spain to be together and work in domestic employment or child care.

Astrid traveled following the instructions of Dragos, who was in charge of organizing and paying all the expenses derived from the trip. Once in Spain, nothing was what it seemed. Dragos had faked the romantic relationship and was not the person he had led the young woman to believe he was, who now owes Dragos a substantial debt.

Without money and without documentation (it was withdrawn), Astrid was subjected to exploitation by Dragos and a compatriot to carry out criminal activities. After six months, and after accumulating several criminal cases and an expulsion order, Astrid finally managed to be attended by a specialized entity, Proyecto Esperanza.

This entity and the Red Cross warn of the “significant change” in the way of attracting victims of trafficking through social networks and the digital environment. Something that Proyecto Esperanza and Sicar Cat already warned 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 the covid, we have seen how new technologies have acquired a greater role in the framework of trafficking in human beings, and how its use by traffickers, both in the recruitment and exploitation phases, has spread exponentially”.

As? The use of new technologies to capture victims of trafficking allows reaching a greater number of people regardless of geographical borders. Traffickers (who can be individuals or organized groups) use the so-called hunting strategy, characterized by a proactive trafficker pursuing victims online. This is done either by gaining the trust of the victims through the simulation of sentimental relationships or friendship, for example through social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, or by responding with fictitious job offers to the demands of employment on digital job search platforms in which false jobs are advertised, they point out in Proyecto Esperanza. A modus operandi confirmed by Irene Sotelo, from the Red Cross human trafficking unit.

In addition, new technologies are also used by traffickers to subdue victims by intimidating, threatening and coercing them, for example, with the possibility of disseminating compromising content to their relatives, contacts and publicly, which exposes them violating their privacy.

The NGOs ensure that these forms of recruitment are used for trafficking for labor exploitation purposes in the cleaning and domestic service sector, for labor exploitation purposes in the agricultural sector, trafficking for labor exploitation purposes in hospitality, for forced crime and for trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation (which includes cases of prostitution and cases of sexual slavery for the benefit of an individual trafficker), they point out from Proyecto Esperanza.