Greg's Corner

UC Berkeley student develops way to track human trafficking rings through Bitcoin

Not too along ago, the major credit card companies in the U.S. stopped Backpage from accepting payments through credit and debit cards for Backpage’s sex trafficking ads. Backpage then started accepting the cryptocurrency Bitcoin for placement of their ads. Now, a Ph.D. candidate from UC Berkeley has come up with a system to track human trafficking rings using Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not as anonymous as people may think. Anytime a Bitcoin transaction is made, it’s registered in a worldwide ledger that is public information. While the Bitcoin users aren’t identified by name, it is easy to track transactions by an ID number. This is an oversimplification of the Bitcoin process, but technically correct. UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Portnoff has developed a system for her dissertation where a Bitcoin transaction can be timed with the placement of a Backpage ad. The timing of the Backpage ad can then be used to match the timing of other ads to determine if they’re being placed by the same Bitcoin user which in turn could identify trafficking rings. In a test, the system was able to be 89% accurate in identifying these rings.

Since Bitcoin can be used for a number of illegal transactions, this could be a huge boon for law enforcement, not just for human trafficking but other illicit crimes as well.