05-06-2025
'Pimps' and websites: AI-driven system has no legal standing yet in Pa., but delivers warnings to 'customers'
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – At noon on a regular Monday last month, a website showed about 80 sex-worker advertisements in the areas of Johnstown, Indiana and Altoona.
A search in the Pittsburgh area showed a woman was willing to travel to Somerset County.
Human Trafficking logo
Nick Lembo, an executive director of Street Grace – a Georgia-based organization that uses a Microsoft-developed platform to disrupt human trafficking – searched the website and shared his screen over Zoom with The Tribune-Democrat.
There were male and transgender categories on the website to search. Lembo went to the 'men seeking women' category, which produced a cascade of ads.
'Believe it or not, around the lunch hour can be busier,' he said. 'So it could start picking up right now in your area. And then sometimes guys are getting off work at 4 p.m., so it can start then. And I'd say most of the time, probably from 5 p.m. through 10 p.m. at night are the busiest times.'
However, the women available through the ads are often not engaging in these transactions of their own volition, he said.
'Most of these women are being forced against their wills by pimps,' he said. 'There's this attitude that sex work is a legitimate profession, and these girls are just doing it on their own, and these guys (who purchase) will often say, 'Well, I know they are doing it on their own.' And the reality is, they really don't, because these girls are never going to give up their pimps.
'The pimps want to stay way in the shadows,' he said.
Statistics are unclear on the scope of the human trafficking problem. Research supported by the National Institute of Justice in 2020 revealed that labor and sex trafficking data appearing in the FBI's national Uniform Crime Reporting Program may significantly understate the extent of human trafficking crimes in the United States.
'Researchers concluded that human trafficking incidents identified in law enforcement and social service agency records likely represented only a fraction of the actual incidence,' the institute's website says.
'Forcing these women'
Using an artificial intelligence-human hybrid system called Transaction Intercept, Lembo and teams of civilians working with Street Grace post decoy ads on websites where men go to purchase sex. Street Grace also offers the same platform, at no cost, to law enforcement.
State Sen. Cris Dush has been a proponent of using the technology in Pennsylvania; however, so far, it has not been used in the commonwealth for human trafficking prosecutions, Lembo said.
Lembo and others working with Street Grace engage with men initiating conversations with their decoy ads and attempt to 'crack some humanity' into them, Lembo said.
In one case, he spoke to a U.S. soldier who had returned briefly from deployment. He explained to the man that he was not law enforcement.
' 'We are here to protect you, actually, because if you are caught, this will affect you socially and professionally,' I said. That got to him,' Lembo said. 'I didn't realize it later that he was a soldier, and many guys in the military know their career is very important to them.'
The soldier shared with Lembo that he 'was just looking for some comfort.' He had returned home from deployment, his girlfriend had broken up with him, and he was not scheduled to be home for long. Lembo warned him.
'I said, 'You need to be careful because there are pimps on these websites, and that's who is forcing these women,' ' Lembo said. 'He said, 'Honestly, I didn't know that. ... I'm going to warn my buddies about these websites.' '
If a potential buyer is unwilling to listen, and if Lembo has enough information, then he'll turn it over to police. In other cases, he can be successful in changing a buyer's mind by educating them about human trafficking.
'There's somebody there who still wants to listen to some reason, and probably the biggest thing we run into is educating these men into understanding that most of these women are being forced against their wills by pimps to have sex with them,' he said.
Force, fraud or coercion
At times, victims or people close to victims will call the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the top Google result for help.
Victims from Cambria and Somerset counties have called the hotline and spoken to someone on the other end – such as Malika Said, a hotline supervisor – who will begin the conversation by asking whether the caller is in a safe place where they aren't being monitored by their trafficker.
Said is then obligated to tell callers about the hotline's mandated reporting policies – the hotline must report acts of violence heard over the phone or discussions of minors being abused or neglected.
And then Said gives them a basic summary of what trafficking is and asks the caller whether their situation aligns with that; trafficking situations involve force, fraud or coercion.
'And then we let the callers take it from there,' she said. 'And we assess their needs and provide whatever it is that they want.'
Said may call a local shelter while on the phone with a caller and say: 'We have this person who's on the phone and they are looking for a safe place to stay tonight; can you help them?'
'We don't want the victims to be calling all these places on their own and just get rejected,' she said, 'especially if all the shelters are full, so we try to see if we can connect them to a place first, and if they are OK with that, then we connect them in a three-way call.'
The hotline may also connect callers with case managers from local human service agencies, who can provide access to housing, food support, securing a job – any service that may eliminate the vulnerability that a trafficker is exploiting.
'A lot of times, people are recruited into the trafficking situations because they have certain vulnerabilities, whether it's economic or social vulnerabilities,' she said. 'Because of these vulnerabilities, they will get recruited into a situation where they are forced to do things they don't want to do, and because of all these limitations that the trafficker sets on them, they feel it's hard to get out of the situation.'
If a victim relies on a trafficker for food or housing, for example, it's difficult for the victim to leave that situation on his or her own.
'There's a lot of times that we do get callers who are ready to leave, but find it very difficult so we talk them through the possibilities; we safety-plan with them, we give them the right resources,' according to Said. 'Not everyone is ready to report to police when they call the hotline, so we just talk through all the options that they have.'
Both sex and labor
Consolidating duplicate calls about the same case, the hotline identified a total of 12 likely victims across six trafficking situations in Cambria County from 2015 to 2022.
'Sometimes we have one situation/one victim call, but more often it's one situation/multiple victims,' National Human Trafficking Hotline spokeswoman Sabrina Thulander said.
The hotline's data are not representative of all trafficking in Cambria County, only of the cases that are reported and identified by the hotline. The volume of calls can be affected by factors including awareness of trafficking as an issue and awareness of what help is available, Thulander said.
The Cambria County cases were almost entirely situations and victims of sex trafficking, she said.
More recent data are available, but it has not yet undergone the same level of validation as the data from previous years, she said.
In Somerset County, the hotline identified three likely victims of trafficking from 2015 to 2022. In those cases, two of the three victims reported they were a victim of both sex and labor trafficking, Thulander said.
'I think with labor it tends to be more fraud, whereas, with sex trafficking, it's force or coercion,' she said.
Labor trafficking can occur through a regular job posting, according to Said.
'They don't really outline what's happening and people are desperate for work, and they get sucked into it,' she said. 'There will be recruiters for some farming industries and so they will kind of recruit you into the trafficking situation, and it might be similar to a regular farming position, but you don't know the difference between the two.
'Sometimes it could also be for modeling; it can be a modeling job posting, but then you get recruited into it and all of a sudden you are in a sex trafficking situation.'
'Investigating ... cases'
For Pennsylvania as a whole, from 2015 to 2022, the hotline identified a total of 2,566 likely victims and 1,487 individual situations of trafficking. Of those, 359 of the likely victims were victims of labor trafficking, and 1,933 were victims of sex trafficking.
Some of the most commonly reported venues for labor trafficking were domestic work, restaurants and food service, and agriculture/farms/animal husbandry.
Some of the most commonly reported venues for sex trafficking were illicit massage businesses, hotel/motel-based commercial sex, residence-based commercial sex, pornography, and internet-based commercial sex, Thulander said.
Cambria County District Attorney Greg Neugebauer said human trafficking investigations are underway locally with help from people who make reports.
'We've had tips from doctors, school personnel, religious folks,' he said. 'And sometimes someone just sees something that just doesn't look right, and they call police. We've had a number of cases that have been prosecuted and, frankly, we are actively investigating several cases right now.'
One case locally came about because a search warrant was executed on a completely unrelated matter, he said, 'and we discovered some things that were troubling.'
In another instance, he said, a trafficker ended up going to jail for an unrelated crime, and authorities subsequently discovered that a person had been sex-trafficked.
'We've seen it locally,' he said. 'I think it exists everywhere, and I think the statistics are accurate that it goes unreported. A lot of it.'
