T-NET: Weakly Supervised Graph Learning for Combatting Human Trafficking

Human trafficking (HT) for forced sexual exploitation, often described as modern-day slavery, is a pervasive problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Perpetrators of this crime post advertisements (ads) on behalf of their victims on adult service websites (ASW). These websites typically contain hundreds of thousands of ads including those posted by independent escorts, massage parlor agencies and spammers (fake ads). Detecting suspicious activity in these ads is difficult and developing data-driven methods is challenging due to the hard-to-label, complex and sensitive nature of the data. In this paper, we propose T-Net, which unlike previous solutions, formulates this problem as weakly supervised classification. Since it takes several months to years to investigate a case and obtain a single definitive label, we design domain-specific signals or indicators that provide weak labels. T-Net also looks into connections between ads and models the problem as a graph learning task instead of classifying ads independently. We show that T-Net outperforms all baselines on a real-world dataset of ads by 7% average weighted F1 score. Given that this data contains personally identifiable information, we also present a realistic data generator and provide the first publicly available dataset in this domain which may be leveraged by the wider research community.