A few days ago, the Greek police, with the cooperation of EUROPOL, dismantled a criminal organization of trafficking and sexual exploitation of women from Latin America.

The perpetrators located online women in a vulnerable social and economic position and with false promises of a better life in Greece convinced them to come to the country, while then blackmailing them and sending them to brothels in Athens.

Today the Interpol announced that human trafficking by committing cyber fraud is a growing international crime.

Its first operation targeting cyber-fraud linked to people-trafficking showed that the crime industry is internationalizing and spreading beyond the region where it first emerged, Southeast Asia, with training centers popping up as far away as Latin America .

Law enforcement forces from more than 20 countries carried out inspections in October in hundreds hotspots human trafficking and smuggling, many of which were known to be used for human trafficking to commit online fraud “on an industrial scale, while at the same time the victims were subjected to physical abuse»

The coordinated operation, which led to hundreds of arrests, revealed the “expanding geographic footprint” of the crime, according to Interpol.

Some of the examples of this phenomenon are Malaysians cheated and taken to Peru with the promise of a high-paying job and Ugandans who were transferred to Dubaithen to Thailand and Myanmar, where they were held prisoner under the supervision of an armed guard and taught how to defraud banks.

Although most such cases are still in the Southeast Asiaas Interpol’s Deputy Director of Sensitive Communities Rosemary Nalubega said in a statement, “this modus operandi is spreading with victims being transported from other continents and with new centers to train victims of trafficking in ways of deception appearing even in Latin America».

According to the United Nations, these fast-growing centers generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.