TOEX at the Europol 'Hackathon'

By Intel and Analytics Lead, Lucy Rogers, and Lead Developer, Jack Lambourne.

We feel honoured to have been nominated as the data and intel lead for modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT) to represent the UK at the Europol 'Hackathon' this year, which was held at the Apeldoorn Police Academy.

After travelling on the Monday, which included a ride in a police riot van to take us to our venue, we were keen to get started on Tuesday, which was a training day – a really informative day of inputs including about indicators of exploitation on websites, a bit about policing the metaverse, and a training session on cryptocurrency.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we were split into teams (with invitees from other nations) to explore websites submitted by European law authorities as being of concern, via open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques.

My (Lucy’s) team found a site on the dark web, which looked to be advertising young people as sex workers.  We submitted both strategic learning points, i.e. which sites were concerning, and operational ones (entities of concern) via Europol. Interestingly, this has come full circle as the TOEX national team has done the searches on UK systems for those entities and fed our results back in.

Our (Jack’s) team took the big-data approach of web-crawling (a) the premier Dutch Adult Services website (ASW) & (b) a Romanian classifieds platform advertising travel into Europe to become a sex worker. In cross-referencing we discovered two telephone numbers appearing in both datasets (indicating the human owner of those telephones are co-ordinating import of Romanian females into the Netherlands and facilitating their sex work using that ASW).

Data products generated for further use by Dutch (& by request other national) authorities included:

• A dataset of 2,900+ live advertisements from the Dutch ASW

• A dataset of 454 international telephone numbers advertising travel for sex work in the Romanian magazine

Friday was our closing day, and we were lucky enough to have an input by Benjamin Strick - the Director of Investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience, who leads teams utilising open-source intelligence to support civil society, media, and governments. We even got to have a chat with him about the work of TOEX. 

Lucy concluded: “It was interesting to see the rules around engagement with potential victims amongst different countries. We had some European countries reaching directly out to victims there in the room, whilst this is something we wouldn’t be doing as intel development teams in the UK.”

Jack added: “The event was an excellent opportunity to understand our approach to MSHT compared to that of European colleagues and was very informative on policing structures that exist cross-border - as I hadn’t worked with Europol before.

“We have also received a very promising outreach from a Dutch national policing colleague who has asked if they can embed the developed ASW scripting into their ongoing MSHT processes – which we find hopeful and hope to set them up in coming weeks.”

If you'd like to find out more about TOEX supports forces with investigations of modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT) - please visit our website.