What is it about?
Imagine scrolling through social media and seeing a job advert offering high pay and free travel. For many, it might seem like a dream — but for traffickers, it’s a tactic. Human traffickers are increasingly using fake job offers online to lure people, especially vulnerable populations, into exploitative situations. Our study investigates how these fake job posts work, how they deceive people, and how anti-trafficking organisations try to stop them. We spent time with an organisation that monitors social media, identifies suspicious adverts, and warns potential victims before it’s too late — helping us better understand the recruitment process and how interventions are carried out. The aim is to use these insights into recruitment to explore how technology can help address the issue, while also minimising potential harms.
Featured Image
Photo by Frank Tunder on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Online recruitment has become one of the most common ways traffickers target victims worldwide, yet there is limited research and technological focus on this early stage of the trafficking process. Our work addresses this gap by examining recruitment through fake job adverts on social media — a tactic that remains under-researched, particularly in African contexts. The paper also highlights the potential for designing technologies to help tackle this issue — for example, by detecting fake job adverts and helping social media platforms make their environments safer for users. However, building such tools comes with significant challenges. Our work outlines the technical and ethical hurdles involved and presents a framework to guide the development of technology to combat online human trafficking in light of these challenges.
Perspectives
From my perspective, this paper is important in bringing attention to a global issue affecting millions. Tackling recruitment is a crucial first step in preventing human trafficking. While often seen as a real-world problem, this work highlights how internet platforms have shaped the crime. Gaining insights from frontline workers and observing the behaviour of suspected traffickers was a valuable learning experience. Anti-trafficking stakeholders are in urgent need of digital tools and data-driven approaches to support their efforts. I believe there are many opportunities for computer scientists and others to contribute to addressing this problem, and I hope this paper encourages more cross-disciplinary engagement.
Towera Moyo
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Investigating Human Trafficking Recruitment Online: A Study of Fraudulent Job Offers on Social Media Platforms, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, May 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3711016.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
