Written by: Andy Greenberg, Wired Magazine

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

Cryptocurrencies have long been touted for their low barriers to entry, cross-border capabilities, and low regulatory nature, allowing people to pay anyone globally any fee. Now, this "any fee" has unprecedentedly started to include people—victims who are trafficked into scam hubs or involved in large-scale sex trading, being openly bought and sold in cryptocurrency transactions, with perpetrators often escaping punishment.

Cryptocurrency tracking company Chainalysis recently released a study indicating an explosive growth in cryptocurrency-supported human trafficking transactions by 2025. This type of crime mainly includes laborers trapped in various hubs in Southeast Asia, forced to engage in online scams, as well as sex trafficking and prostitution rings.

After tracking the cryptocurrencies used by criminal gangs through blockchain, researchers found that cryptocurrency transactions used for human trafficking have increased by at least 85% year-on-year. Chainalysis stated that the annual total of such transactions now reaches at least hundreds of millions of dollars. However, the company refused to provide precise figures, as their estimates remain conservative, and the true scale is likely much higher.

Chainalysis analyst Tom McLouth said, "This is a continuation of industrialized exploitation. Borderless, low-fee payment methods allow human trafficking to scale up more quickly."

The research found that these human trafficking activities are primarily run by Chinese-speaking criminal groups who post advertisements on the messaging platform Telegram. A significant number of posts appear in Telegram's "escrow" black market channels, such as "New Currency Escrow" and the recently shut down "Potato Escrow." These channels offer cryptocurrency escrow services to prevent scams between buyers and sellers, while also becoming large money laundering centers.

Analysts successfully tracked relevant transactions through these advertisements, law enforcement information, and cooperation with partner agencies. Almost all of these transactions used stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar that avoid price volatility, such as USDT and USDC. A large portion of the profits from human traffickin

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