Crypto-funded human trafficking is exploding

Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view.

In new research, 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

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