On August 2, 2024, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Safe Migration in Central Asia (SMICA) Program, in collaboration with United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Ish Nokady, Orlan and other companies, celebrated the World Day against Trafficking in Persons (WDATIP) in Turkmenistan, by hosting an awareness raising forum for information technology professionals.

The purpose of the forum was to familiarize participants with current practical knowledge and skills in ensuring safety in the online space in order to prevent online fraud, human trafficking, sexual and labor exploitation, financial fraud and other dangerous situations.

Over the past few years, law enforcement agencies around the world have witnessed the rise of a new form of modern slavery: forced scamming. Victims of this new form of crime are lured through fake job advertisements into scam complexes located in casinos, hotels and gaming centers and are forced to engage in cyber fraud on an industrial scale. Although online scamming is not a new phenomenon, this type of criminal activity underwent an unprecedented escalation in the post-pandemic period, gradually becoming associated with tracking of people and labor exploitation, expanding in scale and geographic scope.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a favorable scenario for an unprecedented rise in cases of forced scamming. The pace of digitalization has increased exponentially during pandemic restrictions, forcing many professional and personal activities to be conducted almost exclusively online. At the same time, the pandemic left many workers unemployed, desperate for professional opportunities and willing to travel abroad in search of work, widening the pool of potential victims of this new form of modern slavery.

The individuals targeted by these organizations have certain characteristics, they are typically skilled, tech-savvy and computer-savvy professionals in their twenties and thirties, many of them university educated and able to speak more than one language, who have become unemployed during the pandemic or have been unable to maintain stable employment since then.

The increase in the number of victims of forced scamming is a clear example of the evolution of new forms of modern slavery.

SMICA and UNODC, in partnership with the private company Ish Nokady held this forum for Turkmen IT specialists on the risks of online scamming and safe recruitment on the Internet, dedicated to the WDATIP, celebrated on July 30th every year since 2013.

More than a hundred young IT specialists and young people mastering IT professions joined the training.

This initiative by USAID and UNODC aims to attract the general public's attention to the global problem of human trafficking and its consequences. The WDATIP is also intended to remind us of the importance and need for coordinated and consistent action in combating this phenomenon while consistently respecting fundamental human rights, both at the national and international levels.

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