Airbnb Rentals Used For Human Trafficking

Airbnb Rentals Used For Human Trafficking | Ecency

Human trafficking is regarded as the fastest growing criminal activity in the United States today. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that impacts millions of people around the world.

Over the years, the hotel industry has always been one of multiple venues that traffickers have used as a setting to carry out their plans for exploiting their victims. Even high-end, 5-star hotels aren't immune.

And for this reason, motel and hotel companies have ventured to come up with proactive steps to try and tackle human trafficking.

Tens of thousands of hotel employees have received training over the years, coaching them on what to possibly look for, warning signs, to help identify possible human trafficking situations.

A great deal of reports that get made are coming from someone who had direct contact with a potential victim at some point, and some hotels have even been sued for their alleged negligence in the matter and for having profited from the crime.

Seeing as the motel and hotel industry have become the backdrop for a great deal of victimization to take place in the human trafficking market, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Airbnb might also face similar issues. And they are.

According to the Toronto police, there is a growing trend that involves people who are using Airbnb rentals to carry out their crimes and exploit human trafficking victims.

In the past 2 years they say that they have seen a dramatic increase in the number of cases.

Authorities warn those who might be thinking about putting their property up for rent on the site that they should be more careful about who they potentially allow into their home. Airbnb has since responded and said that they are dedicated to working with authorities to try and combat the issue and track down the traffickers.

To try and address the growing issue of human trafficking, hotels, motels, and now Airbnb, are working with a leading anti-human trafficking organization that is known as Polaris. Airbnb will be sharing extensive reservation data with Polaris so that they can help them to potentially identify any problems.

One effort to try and address the issue of human trafficking, involved the development of a clever app was designed over a year ago, known as TraffickCam, that provides a platform for users to snap pictures of hotel rooms or motel rooms that they stay in, which it then uses to try and determine the whereabouts of perpetrators.

There are already more than 100,000 people who have experimented with using the app and they've already got more than 150k hotels that have been included in the database of crowd-sourced photos.

Today it's estimated that more than half of the hotels in the U.S. are trained on how to prevent and possibly disrupt sex trafficking, but obviously there is still a glaring problem because millions are still being victimized.