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Human traffickers are forcing victims to obtain loans to finance their activities and open bank accounts to move and conceal their proceeds without drawing the attention of investigators and compliance officers, a Washington, D.C.-based group claimed Thursday.

In a 49-page report by Polaris, a nonprofit organization established to combat and shine light on the $150 billion modern day slavery industry, anonymous sources recounted various ways that traffickers exploit the formal financial system and the crucial role that credit scores play in some stages of the process.

“Everything was put in my name with [my trafficker] as a co-signer, since [my trafficker] used a fake name,” a sex trafficking victim told Polaris. “When I escaped, everything faulted back on me.”

This pattern most commonly occurs in smaller, “un-networked” and “less organized types of sex trafficking, such as escort services and some subtypes of residential brothels,” Polaris claimed.

Perpetrators also frequently force victims and their relatives to purchase and reload prepaid cards as a means of distancing themselves from the transactions.

The tactic not only helps human traffickers stay under the radar, it also has lasting effects on their victims.

One survivor told Polaris that past expenditures she was forced to make on Backpage.com—the now-defunct, Dallas-based sex-ad website prosecutors tied to pimping and money laundering—prevented her from being able to buy a prepaid card for herself after she escaped her handlers.

Dozens of surveyed victims said they still owe fees and balances incurred from when they were enslaved, according to Polaris, which noted that some financial institutions have programs through which survivors can rebuild their credit and open “second chance bank accounts.”

These programs “provide an entry point into mainstream banking systems for individuals with poor credit reports or who may have been previously de-banked by a financial institution after being associated with an account identified as having ongoing suspicious activity,” Polaris concluded in the report.

Nearly 100 victims surveyed for the study also pointed out the most common of the several red flags of human trafficking that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, listed in a 2014 advisory that generated a 900 percent increase in suspicious activity reports, or SARs, on clients believed tied to the industry.

Around 60 percent and 45 percent of those surveyed reported having observed their traffickers conceal their sources of income and live lifestyles inconsistent with their stated income, respectively.

Nearly 30 percent of victims claimed their traffickers escorted them to banks and used their accounts, while “almost all” of the victims reported that their traffickers avoided “putting their name[s] on paper.”

Other red flags listed by FinCEN in 2014 were less apparent to victims. Only 7 percent saw their traffickers open accounts but never receive any deposits, and less than 20 percent witnessed attempts to structure.

The report provides new human-trafficking typologies for compliance officers to vet customers and single out transactions potentially tied to the human trafficking industry, including those involving prepaid cards, according to John Byrne, a former executive vice president of ACAMS who contributed to the report.

“If Polaris could be free to share more specific information on victims, and those they believe are causing the activity, that could dramatically improve a bank’s ability to file more accurate SARs and improve their human trafficking investigations,” Byrne, now president of Condor Consulting in Virginia, said.