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Cryptocurrency is frictionless, cross-border, Low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever, it’s all about people: the victims of human trafficking who are forced into it Scam vehicles and the industrial-scale sex trade, which is bought and sold in cryptocurrency trades It is carried out with impunityoften in plain sight.
In new research published today, cryptocurrency tracking firm Chainalysis has found that transactions funded with cryptocurrencies for human trafficking — largely… Forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia They have grown dramatically in 2025, and are forced to work as online scammers, as well as sex trafficking prostitution rings. According to the company’s analysis, which is largely based on tracking the cryptocurrencies used by these criminal operations across blockchains, researchers found that cryptocurrency transactions for human trafficking grew by at least 85 percent year-over-year. Chainalysis says the total amount of these transactions now amounts to at least hundreds of millions of dollars annually — though it declined to give an exact figure for the total of these sales because it viewed its measurements as a conservative estimate that likely underestimates the true scale of the problem.
“This is a continuation of the story of industrial exploitation,” says Tom McLouth, Chainalysis analyst. “The advent of borderless payments with low fees has created the opportunity for human trafficking to expand more rapidly.”
The human trafficking operations Chainalogy identified in its research were primarily Chinese-speaking criminal groups advertising their messaging service offerings. cable. Many posts were found on “secured” black markets operating on Telegram channels, e.g Xinbei Guarantee and Recently defunct Todo Guaranteewhich provides escrow services that accept and hold cryptocurrencies to prevent fraud against users. Chainalysis says it has also identified other independent Telegram channels selling prostitution services.
By identifying trafficking operations from Telegram posts as well as information from law enforcement and other partner groups, the company’s analysts were able to trace the transactions of the operations, which are conducted almost entirely using “stablecoins“, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar to avoid volatility, such as Tether and USDC. Much of the profits from human trafficking have also flowed back into the same Telegram-based escrow markets, which serve as vast multi-billion dollar money laundering hubs, with sellers willing to offer cash in exchange for dirty cryptocurrencies.
Clustering across Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, scams exploiting forced laborers, often lured from South Asia and Africa with fraudulent job offers, have been a thriving trade for years. They now generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually, more than any other form of cybercrime, and human rights groups estimate they have been ensnared by hundreds of thousands of recruited fraudsters. However, Chainalysis says the majority of the measurable growth it tracks in cryptocurrency-financed human trafficking actually came from sex trafficking operations. She found detailed Chinese-language advertisements on the Telegram app describing profiles of sex workers available around the clock, for more long-term arrangements, and even international services offering to transport sex workers to locations such as Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or other “overseas” destinations.
Chainalysis found that some ads referred to suspected sexual trafficking of minors, such as “Lolita” and “real high school students.” The company’s analysis of operations’ cryptocurrency transactions also shows that their payments flow to entities that oversee large numbers of women and girls, not independent sex workers. Chainalysis found that 62% of transactions for the typical prostitution rings it examined were between $1,000 and $10,000, while for international sex trafficking operations in particular, it found that nearly half of the transactions exceeded $10,000, indicating “organized criminal enterprises operating on a large scale,” as the company describes it.