Human trafficking is increasingly a focus for law authorities – and facial recognition technology can have an important role in fighting it.
According to U.S. Department of Justice human trafficking data published in October 2023, a total of 2,027 person were referred to U.S. attorneys for human trafficking offences in fiscal year 2021, a 49 per cent increase from the 1,360 persons referred in 2011. The numbers of persons prosecuted for human trafficking more than doubled from 2011 to 2021.
According to the U.S. Department of State, it’s difficult to find reliable statistics related to human trafficking. In 2022, a report released by the International Labour Organization and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the International Organization for Migration, estimated that at any given time in 2021 approximately 27.6 million people were in forced labour around the world, including forced commercial sexual exploitation.
For Henry Valentino, founder, CEO and President of eConnect Inc., the reality of what has become what he called a “scourge” hit him straight on during a recent meeting with a tribal casino operator in Washington State.
eConnect is an AI and facial recognition technology company with a platform that focuses solely on casinos and gaming, as operators complement manual security with the latest in technology, balancing pleasing patrons and ensuring profitability with compliance and avoiding crime.
Casinos can attract a lot of people who are not wanted on the property, as Valentino explained. Some are criminals. Some are advantage players. Some may not know how to control themselves when it comes to gambling and get banned from the property.
Valentino discovered on that trip to the tribal casino that the eConnect facial recognition technology offers a tremendous benefit in the work to combat human trafficking. eConnect had been running facial recognition technology at that property for eight months.
The casino operators showed him how they were using the system, specifically as it related to human trafficking.
“I’m the CEO of a software company, so I don’t really know much about how human trafficking even takes place, or how these properties are trying to combat that,” he said.
A difference with prostitution, that obliterates any stereotypes, when Valentino looked at the footage – there was no obvious “bad guy” controlling these women, selling them out.
“What struck me was that it was a young middle-aged woman that was at the center of this investigation,” he said. “She was the center of delivering people who would fulfill the contract. She was out soliciting in the casino. She would then deliver someone from the parking garage, who had been waiting in vans. This guy showed us 40 different associations of people he thought were being trafficked in the hotel and in the casino.
“And what he had done, and why facial recognition ends up being so powerful, is that we can’t possibly remember all these faces. We can’t keep track of people we’ve seen before, especially if they are people that haven’t really done anything that makes us be on the lookout for.”
So, in this scenario, security in the casino had recognized that this person had been present when they interrupted a prostitution event in the hotel. The woman in question was put into the property’s facial recognition system so that management was notified anytime she was on the property. They started to assemble all the other people she kept showing up with, close to 30 associates.
“What the facial recognition system can do, is, say, here is the one person I am focused on, and here are all the people they have been seen with in the last 15 minutes,” Valentino added. With facial recognition, operators can know every single person that is coming and going from the property.
The eConnect platform is built so it provides a digital evidence board or a detective board, also called a “conspiracy board” on those Dick Wolf TV crime shows – a manual collage of media from different sources interconnected with string to mark connections in an investigation.
With human trafficking, casino operators, as well as industries like hotels, have a new purpose for eConnect’s facial recognition technology beyond other areas of casino security and compliance, as well as identifying VIPs to be able to better customize their casino experience. The benefits of being able to use eConnect technology to help battle human trafficking was unplanned, according to Valentino.
“And it was so interesting to me that I asked this employee of the surveillance room from the tribe if he would be available to conduct a webinar on this for our other customers,” he said. “And he told me that not only would he include our other customers or other prospects, but he would bring in the FBI, Department of Homeland Security. In their case, they’re about 50 miles from Portland, so they have a human trafficking division in the Portland Police group also, and he was kind of coordinating this whole group of people that are trying to combat this scourge on society, and a scourge on casinos. Because, obviously, casinos don’t want those people in there.”
Valentino said every time he goes to a client’s property, he asks what they are doing to combat human trafficking, especially if it’s a new hotel, where policies might not be in place.
“Facial recognition takes all the question out of it,” he said. “The likelihood of a person who has been arrested for prostitution running into the same security employee again is so small. What [casino operators] are saying every time I ask about it, is that they are being asked to focus more time and effort on. Obviously, they want to.
“Now we’ve got human trafficking, and we’ve got this scenario where these people aren’t even legal to be in the country, they’re being told that they’re going to make money, they need to make money. They’re being brought to the casinos with the idea that they will be trapped, and they will be sold.”
As Valentino said, while human trafficking impacts countless industries, the impact on the casino industry is unique – no one is going to take away Marriott’s license if they are found to have traffickers in their hotels. They might get a fine, or bad press. But they’re not under the threat of being closed. Casinos are under threat of losing their license. That’s one of the reasons why casinos have become leaders in this space.
The technology keeps getting better in terms of accuracy and speed, and size of the database, he added.
“There is no doubt [human trafficking] is an issue that is at the forefront now,” he said.
Undesirable elements of society are still drawn to the money and attraction of the casino. But technology like eConnect is just making casinos safer and better and more of an acceptable entertainment, with fewer issues, like the trafficking problem.
“The technology has gotten so good so fast,” Valentino said. “It’s really a modest cost … less than a full-time employee … to really get this on board.”
