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The novel coronavirus pandemic has created new opportunities for human traffickers and made forced labor in the agricultural and meat processing industries more difficult to detect, European officials said.

In a 70-page annual report released Friday, the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, or GRETA, describes how COVID-19 has fueled fraud, online exploitation, human trafficking and other crimes and stretched the ability of law enforcement to respond.

“The situation of migrant workers in the meat processing industry worsened considerably, with fraud and deception in the recruitment of workers being reported,” GRETA found.

The ability of financial institutions to detect payments tied to traffickers remains critical, a GRETA spokesperson told ACAMS moneylaundering.com on Friday, citing the role that transaction monitoring recently played in detecting coerced labor operations in the British textile industry, and in the rubber glove and palm oil industries in Malaysia.

“Better financial monitoring is necessary as a preventative measure, but it needs to be linked to supply chain monitoring to be really effective [because] the activity is often interwoven in what may appear to be legitimate transactions,” the spokesperson said.

Common red flags of trafficking promulgated by the Financial Action Task Force, which sets global anti-money laundering standards, include the wages of several workers being paid into the same account and quickly withdrawn, multiple, apparently unlinked customers sharing the same address, and the opening and closing of several individual accounts in rapid succession.

But widespread closures of brick-and-mortar locations during the lockdown has prevented banks and other institutions from identifying visibly suspicious behavior, such as individuals who accompany one or several migrants into a branch or translate for them while they open accounts.

“It is important to highlight the need for industries to work with survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking to better understand the types of patterns and red flags that they should be monitoring closely,” said Daniel Thelesklaf, ambassador of the U.N. finance against slavery and trafficking initiative.

Workers in sectors that have faced severe contractions during the pandemic, such as construction and domestic work, have become more vulnerable, said Thelesklaf, who formerly lead Switzerland’s financial intelligence unit.

A year ago, as the pandemic began to spread throughout Europe, anti-trafficking analysts told ACAMS moneylaundering that the health crisis and the measures taken to contain it would not only facilitate human trafficking, especially in the agricultural sector, but also make it more difficult to identify victims.

Those concerns appear to have been justified, with GRETA reporting a rise of labor exploitation in Italy during the pandemic, and “hidden prostitution, accompanied by more exploitative conditions and violence” in Germany after brothels began closing.

Lockdown measures have also reduced the ability of nonprofit groups and law enforcement agencies to identify trafficking.

According to GRETA, the number of victims detected by British authorities fell 23 percent from April to June 2020, while Moldova logged a continuous decrease over the first nine months of last year.

Already considered susceptible to money launderers who use fake rentals to move cash, Airbnb and other short-term lodging services have increasingly been used by sex traffickers in Spain as a replacement for brothels during the pandemic, GRETA reported.

Enhanced monitoring of payments for short-term accommodations, especially amid the sharp, prolonged drop in tourism associated with the pandemic, could generate useful financial intelligence for law enforcement.

But assigning more scrutiny to such transactions may not be particularly useful in the long term, after the volume of rentals returns to previous levels, GRETA’s spokesperson said.

GRETA also observed a surge in online sexual exploitation of women and children during the pandemic that may prompt increased vigilance from payment services providers, assuming that traffickers have not already switched to using cryptocurrency.

“We are beginning to see positive movement by some fintechs towards partnering with law enforcement,” Thelesklaf told moneylaundering.com. “Mobilizing the financial sector against exploitation has never been more important than it is today.”

However, the closure of brothels, strip clubs, massage parlors and other establishments that may offer sexual services has driven tens of millions of customers to online platforms such as Onlyfans, which may complicate efforts to identify suspicious payments among the ever-increasing volume of legal transactions.

Contact Gabriel Vedrenne at gvedrenne@acams.org