How Artificial Intelligence Is Tracking Sex Traffickers

Machine learning technology is opening up new strategies to find and prosecute the men who profit from the worst of the illegal sex trade

“Hey there. You available?”

“Yes I am… how long did you want company for?”

“Was hoping for an hour, maybe half. Depends.”

“Half. 125 hour. 200 donation.”

“Gotcha. Can you stay for half hour then?”

“You’re not a cop or affiliated with any law enforcement, right?”

“Ha. No. You?”

In the thrum of texts that flit across cell towers every day, arranging sex from online ads, this was just another exchange. What followed, however, was anything but ordinary.

On June 4, 2015, a 33-year-old woman pulled off a road in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and knocked on the door of room 209 at the Staybridge Suites. She expected an assignation with the man who had sent the earlier texts. What she got, once she accepted payment, was a sting. The man was a state trooper.

So far, a pretty normal prostitution bust. But then things took a turn. The woman told the troopers that she actually hadn’t been the one texting. The texter was a man she knew as “GB,” and he was waiting for her in a silver Acura out in the hotel parking lot. She also wasn’t the only woman GB was working. There were others, including a teen the woman once saw GB smack to the ground. There were drugs involved, too.

When troopers found GB in the car, he was on his phone posting a sex ad on the classified advertising site Backpage. There was another young woman with him. The troopers arrested him, took the phone, and wrote him up on charges of promoting prostitution and related offenses.

But Lehigh County Deputy District Attorney Robert Schopf saw the potential for something more. After further investigation, Schopf amended the charges to include sex trafficking in individuals and geared up for a hard legal fight. Unlike promoting prostitution — often a misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, and even if it rises to felony, the maximum sentence is seven years — trafficking adults is always a felony, with a penalty of up to 10 years. But for that Schopf would have to prove that GB, aka Cedric Boswell, now 46, of Easton, Pennsylvania, had not only knowingly promoted the women for sex, but had actually led them into it by fraud, force, or coercion. And to do that, Schopf would have to convince a jury that would be thinking, as he put it, “‘Well, wait a minute. She walked out of that hotel room every day. Where are these chains?’”

Boswell’s case seemed no different. A forensics dump of his cell phone produced 6,306 images, mostly of scantily-clad women. It also turned up a promising favicon, or favorite icon: posting.backpage.com, the page on the now-defunct website where sex workers, pimps, and traffickers could place ads for women selling sexual services. At the time, Backpage was the Amazon of the escort industry, the first place people would go to sell sex — and the first place law enforcement would go to track them down. In fact, Backpage was where the Pennsylvania State Troopers had found the original ad that led them to the GB bust.

The phone was full of evidence, but what the police had was circumstantial. The challenge for prosecutors was connecting those photos to actual escort ads. “We just don’t have that amount of time to manually look through the [images on the phone] and then try to compare: Is this the girl that I’m seeing on Backpage?” says Julia Kocis, director of Lehigh County’s Regional Intelligence and Investigation Center (RIIC), a web-based system run by the DA’s office that aggregates local crime records and supports law enforcement. “Where do I even begin to find them?”

But Kocis had an idea. She had heard about a new tool called Traffic Jam that was specifically designed to aid sex trafficking investigations with the help of artificial intelligence. Traffic Jam had been created by Emily Kennedy, and had grown out of her study of machine learning for criminal investigations as a research analyst at the Robotics Institute at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University — as well as what Kennedy called “a lot of talking to detectives about their pain points” around sex trafficking cases.

Kocis, who was by then working closely with Schopf on the case, decided to try a free trial of Traffic Jam. “I ran the images and phone number through the tool,” she says, “and it brought back the ads he’d posted in minutes. Then I futzed around with it, and it showed a map of where the phone number was used to post girls at different locations, and over time.”

Kocis couldn’t believe how effective the tool was — and neither could Schopf. “Julia sent it to me and it was just awesome,” he says. “When you have something that critical, [the Traffic Jam evidence] is a smoking gun. I mean, there was absolutely no way for [Boswell] to get out from underneath that evidence.”

The original 33-year-old woman was reluctant to testify, but she agreed after Schopf told her about the corroborating evidence gotten with the help of Traffic Jam. After two hours of deliberation, on April 19, 2016, a jury found Cedric Boswell guilty of several crimes, including trafficking in individuals. He is currently serving a sentence of 13 to 26 years in state prison.