‘Low risk, high reward’: How sex traffickers use coercive debt to exploit survivors

Coercive debt and financial abuse are a 'systematic' part of how sex traffickers operate in Canada, with at least a quarter of all survivors dealing with fraudulent debt.

Coercive debt and financial abuse are a “systematic” part of how sex traffickers operate in Canada, with at least a quarter of all survivors dealing with fraudulent debt.

Julia Drydyk, executive director of the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, says that research they did in 2020 on human trafficking corridors in Canada found that traffickers were “systematically putting the expenses associated with the trafficking in the victim’s name.”

While awareness of sex trafficking has grown, awareness of the financial abuse that goes on has not, which has advocates pushing for change.

“When it’s in someone else’s name, it’s harder to track from an anti-money laundering perspective,” Drydyk said.

“But we also know that the debts incurred are used as a tool to continue to coerce, threaten, and control those that they’re exploitinge.”

Victim Services Toronto reports that at least one in four sex trafficking survivors have debt set up in their name by their trafficker, making starting over seem like a daunting task.

Having fraudulent debt set up in their name leaves a lasting financial impact as they try to rebuild their lives, said Kaitlin Bick, an anti-human trafficking specialist with Victim Services Toronto (VST).

Survivors have, on average, around $20,000 in fraudulent debt set up by their traffickers, data from VST shows. In some cases, that debt can rack up to as much as $100,000.