Crypto-funded human trafficking is exploding
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In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking—largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings—grew explosively in 2025.
According to the firm's analysis, based largely on tracing across blockchains the cryptocurrency those criminal operations use, researchers found that crypto transactions for human trafficking grew at least 85 percent year over year.
The total amount of those transactions, Chainalysis says, is now at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually—though it declined to give an exact number for that sales total because it considered its measurements to be a conservative estimate that likely undercounts the true scale of the issue.
“This is the continuation of a story of industrialized exploitation,” says Chainalysis analyst Tom McLouth. “The emergence of borderless, low-fee payments has created the opportunity for human trafficking to scale faster.”
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