New App Uses Hotel Room Photos to Help Catch Human Traffickers

Roadside motel neon sign in Oregon

TraffickCam stores a database of hotel room photos and identifies locations that traffickers use as venue.

A new app called TraffickCam may be well on its way to save a lot of lives. According to Triple Pundit, the app compiles a database of hotel room photos in order to find patterns in carpeting, furniture, room accessories and window views. All that information is used to catch human traffickers using hotels as their venue.

A 2015 study from the National Human Trafficking Resource Center says that hotels and motels have the second highest number of sex trafficking cases in the United States, losing only to commercial brothels.

Hotels and motels are an attractive option to traffickers, as they can pay in cash and leave without any prior notice to the facility, which allows them to change location as often as they want. “Traffickers sometimes upload pictures of their victims and use them as promotion, knowing the chances that authorities trace it back to the location of the picture are slim”, Triple Pundit reported.

However, researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis developed an app that compiles a database with more than 1.5 million photos of hotel rooms across the country. They hope the app can help decrease the trafficking numbers dramatically, by identifying the location of the photos used as promotion and, thus, helping law enforcement to catch them.

In a little over a year since it was developed, the app has already compiled photos from 145,000 hotels in the United States.

“Criminals take advantage of technology to advertise and coordinate illegal sex trafficking,” said app developer and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Robert Pless. “We’re using new technologies to fight trafficking, with this app that allows everyone to contribute data and with new image analysis tools to help law enforcement use the images in investigations.”

[Photo: Hollywood Unlocked]