Project Protect has helped financial institutions catch millions of dollars generated from sexual exploitation
Ms. Nagy, an advocate for survivors of, was pacing the stage at a financial crimes conference in Toronto, back in November of 2015. As she peered into the audience, a crowd of 300 bankers and government suits, she clutched a microphone and swallowed her nerves.
“My boss doesn’t know this yet,” he began. “But I promise you – I promise you – that we will do something. We will get behind you.” But this is a conservative estimate, according to economic-crime experts, who say that human trafficking is under-reported and is often perpetrated by organized crime groups that have little fear of getting caught.
“Human trafficking is all about money,” Ms. Nagy said. “If you follow the money, you will find out where the money comes from, and you find out where the money goes.”Ms. Nagy’s path to becoming an advocate for survivors of sex trafficking began on April 27, 1998, the day she left Hungary for Canada. All Ms. Nagy had to do, according to the female recruiter in Budapest, was sign a contract, provide her personal details along with emergency contact information for her family. The agency would buy her a plane ticket and take care of the rest.
She learned the trio were actually transnational sex traffickers. Their headhunter in Budapest, a girlfriend of one of the men, had tricked Ms. Nagy into signing a contract – written in English, a language she didn’t know – that stated that she would work as an exotic dancer. Back then, Canada was readily offering temporary work permits to foreigners seeking jobs as strippers.Ms. Nagy didn’t want to work as an exotic dancer. But when she protested, her traffickers told her she had no choice.
She learned a few English words and befriended three Canadians, all strip club employees. They helped her escape after learning she was enslaved.Out of the Shadows: A Memoir. It took her years, but she pulled herself up and out of the darkness and found new purpose by helping other victims. In 2009, she founded a non-profit organization called Walk With Me that operated Canada’s first safe house for trafficked survivors.
“Police would call us at 3 a.m. We would drive anywhere – around three to four hours around Ontario,” she explained. She ended up amassing more than 2,700 police contacts on her personal cellphone. Those officers would regularly request her help with forging trust with survivors and overcoming roadblocks in their investigations.
“When you go to court, everything is based on the victim,” Ms. Nagy explained. “The victim needs to be a perfect victim … And if you can tear down the victim and rip her apart, there is no way to prove human trafficking. It’s ‘he said, she said.’” But later that year, Ms. Nagy received an invitation to speak at a software company called Verafin Inc. The St. John’s-based company, which is now a subsidiary of Nasdaq, Inc., uses technology to detect fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes.
Verafin’s new tools were designed to identify transactions that bear the hallmarks of trafficking activity, such as multiple hotel and motel payments and late night deposits or withdrawals at ATMs. The engineer asked Ms. Nagy to review some of the suspicious bank account activity to help him better understand the financial patterns present in trafficking, and improve the software.
Still, Ms. Nagy wondered why Canadian banks weren’t taking similar action on human trafficking. She set out to convince them, and their regulators, to be part of the solution.
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