A new financial crime guide is now available to help you detect and stop suspicious activity related to forced sexual servitude. This form of slavery represents around 30% of slavery cases in Australia. Victims are forced to provide sexual services against their will, are unable to refuse violent or unsafe practices, and must hand over most – if not all – of their earnings to the perpetrators.

The guide provides a comprehensive set of financial indicators to help you understand, identify and report suspicious financial activity to stop sexual slavery. It is important to note that financial analysis alone can make it difficult to differentiate between legal sex work and illegal sex work, and therefore needs to be used in conjunction with other indicators and information to define and detect the activity.

Download the guide: Financial crime guide – Detecting and stopping forced sexual servitude in Australia (PDF, 1.58MB) 

More guides coming soon

Two new financial crime guides focused on ‘Preventing the criminal abuse of digital currencies’ and ‘Detecting and reporting ransomware’ are coming soon. Once released, these guides will be available on our website – watch this space.

What you need to do

Use the behavioural patterns and financial indicators provided in these reports to identify if you need to carry out additional customer checks (enhanced customer due diligence) and if a suspicious matter report (SMR) needs to be submitted to AUSTRAC.

For more information on SMRs and your reporting obligations, please see the suspicious matter reports page.