Photos of your hotel room could help catch sex traffickers | CNN Business

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A girl poses provocatively in a dark hotel room. For a fixed fee, any willing client can pay to have sex with her.

For investigators trying to track down sex traffickers and their victims, these online ads can hold critical clues.

The tiniest of details in a room could reveal its location, but there are too many ads for law enforcement to scan each one for clues.

This is where TraffickCam comes in. It’s a simple phone app that uses snapshots of collective hotel rooms to help law enforcement locate victims and prosecute sex traffickers.

Any traveler stopping at a hotel can turn on their phone’s GPS location and upload photos of the room from four different angles to TraffickCam’s database.

The idea is that law enforcement agencies can cross-check ads with suspected trafficking victims in hotel rooms against TraffickCam’s photo database.

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TraffickCam’s image analysis tools transform the photos into a series of data points, using features such as patterns on the carpet, paintings on the wall and landmarks outside the window. The different data points in the photos play an important role in matching the location.

TraffickCam is the creation of the Exchange Initiative and a team of researchers at the University of Washington. The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph provided a $100,000 grant to begin development of the app, and private donations are made through the St. Louis Community Foundation not for profit.

“This is an easy way for citizens to take a stand against sex trafficking simply by taking pictures,” Kimberly Ritter, director of development for the Exchange Initiative, told CNN.

Since its launch in June 2016, Ritter says more than 150,000 hotels have been added to the TraffickCam database.

“We have over 100,000 people using the app right now and we hope more will join us in taking action and fighting this fight,” he says.

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But even if the database identifies the location of a hotel room, Ritter says it’s “luck of the draw” that the victim is still there. That’s because traffickers often post photos from one site to advertise services on another, he explains.

Another strategy is for dealers to base themselves in a central location and advertise in multiple cities. They then drive the girls to different cities, depending on where they get responses to the ads.

“Local girls working locally with local pimps will use local photos, most of the time,” Sergeant Adam Kavanaugh, supervisor of the St. Louis County Multijurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force, told CNN. Louis.

In those cases, Kavanaugh imagines that TraffickCam could help investigators identify the hotel to prepare for an effective operation.

But when it comes to tracking what Kavanaugh calls “travelers”—trafficking victims who move across the United States—the app may be more helpful in showing movement across state lines.

“Then we can file a federal case because of interstate commerce,” Kavanaugh says.

This could lead to a longer sentence for a convicted trafficker.

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Before the app can be rolled out to law enforcement agencies across the United States, Kavanaugh and the St. Louis are testing her.

“We’re beta testing in the St Louis area right now and we’re getting positive hits,” he says, referring to ads that match hotel room photos in the database.

After initial testing in this small area, Kavanaugh is optimistic about the role TraffickCam can play in identifying both hotel rooms and routes used by traffickers.

“Technology drives everything we do today, and this is just one more tool that law enforcement can use to make our jobs a little safer and a little easier,” he says.

Ritter expects the app to be available to all U.S. law enforcement agencies in the spring of 2017 and will eventually be available worldwide.

“Since this technology is so new and cutting edge, we need to perfect it here in the U.S. and then we’ll look to make it globally accessible,” says Ritter.

Global users can now download the app and upload photos to the database. Ritter says all photographs uploaded to TraffickCam from around the world are stored for future use.

The US Human Trafficking Hotline found that hotels and motels were a common place for sex trafficking, with nearly 10% of known trafficking cases reported to them in 2016 at a hotel or motel, although Polaris, which operates the hotline, believes the real figure is much higher.

Just under 10% of the cases were commercial brothels and in almost eight percent of the cases the location was unknown. Less than five percent of the cases were on the street.

The app will only be able to narrow in on exact locations if enough photos are added to the database, but Ritter strongly believes that people will continue to add them.

“It’s amazing how many people are interested in fighting this atrocity,” he says.

“The more we come together to fight this crime, the better chance we have of eradicating it.”