Driving traffickers out of business
From a video by Faith Driven Investors
Traffickers have turned human exploitation into a profitable business - so what if we could make it unprofitable? Despite the staggering reality that there are 40 million slaves worldwide, many people still believe it’s impossible - or even unethical - to profit while solving the world’s greatest problems.
Eagle Venture Fund has started to crack the code through its Freedom Fund. By leveraging the power of the free market, they’ve discovered an innovative way to take down traffickers and bankrupt a $150 Billion industry worldwide. Investible capital can be used as a weapon in the fight against slavery and exploitation.
Here are some insights:
Human trafficking is a billion $ business. Unlike other elicit activity like weapons and drugs, a human being can be sold several times per day and so the organized crime networks are seeing that this is incredibly lucrative. It doesn't just occur overseas. It happens in our backyards and our communities.
We don't have enough government agents or police officers. So we have a lot of unsupervised darkness that is happening. As well as non-profits and governments taking action, for-profit companies can play a meaningful role. We are fighting an economic problem, so how do we make money (to be sustainable)? There's a number of things.
Everybody that participates in the trafficking chain of events has to have a way of taking a payment, of depositing those payments. All kinds of everything from Airbnb to hotels, there's a whole lot of businesses all involved and participating in most cases completely unwittingly in this entire process.
The police can close down a brothel but that would be just one location the local crime ring runs and they'll open another one down the street in a few weeks. So you don't solve the problem. But if you look at them as an enterprise, they have a revenue line on one side and an expense line on the other. If we're able to push up the expense line and pull down the demand if we can, the business becomes unprofitable and it shuts down.
We can decimate trafficking in our lifetime by taking entire pockets of it and making it unprofitable.
Eagle's team were blown away by both the scale and the proximity of the problem and that culminated into them doing a series of investments over seven years into companies that live and breathe and were formed to combat human trafficking. There are now the market dynamics and enough deal flow to build an entire fund around combating human trafficking.
So the team have invested in businesses such as:
Evidencity - creating transparency to eliminate modern slavery by building datasets to see how businesses and individuals are exposed to modern slavery through their supplier and customer networks.
Darkwatch - DarkWatch Scan transforms compliance by running real-time scans across a company's data sources, detecting risks that static lists and outdated screening tools miss, for example fentanyl producers, sex traffickers, and potential use of organised crime proceeds.
GameSafe - instantly alerts parents to suspicious chat behaviour in games, protecting a child from online threats and predatory activity.
Watch this 12 min video:
Disclaimer: Now the usual disclaimer. This content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. This article is an illustration of how business can be used to address pressing social issues. It is very important to do your own research and/or take advice before any investing. This must be based on your own personal circumstances rather than rely on information presented here.
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From a video by Faith Driven Investors, 04/06/2025