How Cybercrime Fuels Human Trafficking and Gambling Scams

Illegal gambling operations rely on cybercrime and human trafficking, and trafficked individuals are often forced to work in online casinos and scams, said Infoblox threat researchers.

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Human traffickers exploit people for labor in illegal gambling operations and scams such as pig-butchering, and trafficked individuals are often forced into servitude in Southeast Asia, said Renée Burton and Maël Le Touz. Cybercriminals set up shell companies to secure sponsorship deals with European football teams, using the exposure to drive traffic to illegal gambling websites, particularly in Asia (see: Infoblox CEO on Bringing DNS Protection to Domain Monitoring).

“In that particular case of illegal gambling, they’ll rely on a network of human-trafficked people to do their customer service, to run every kind of profitable operation they can think of,” Le Touz said. “In a casino, when you have some downtime, you can use the same people to do pig-butchering or crypto scans or all sorts of money laundering because you need to keep profitability up.”

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group at Black Hat 2024, Burton and Le Touz also discussed:

• The role of cryptocurrency in laundering profits from illicit activities;
• The challenges for law enforcement in targeting transnational criminal networks;
• Why DNS blocking can be an effective tool to combat illegal online gambling.

Burton is a subject matter expert in DNS-based threats and leads the algorithm development and research in DNS intelligence.

Le Touz specializes in the detection of threats as they manifest in the DNS. His background is in financial fraud investigation, and he has strong experience in reverse engineering.