When Noel Thomas was a child, he was walking in a shopping center with his father and his 4-year-old sister when a stranger walked up and made a seemingly off-hand comment about the shirt Thomas was wearing.
“(My dad) thought that that was very strange. In that split second, he looked down, and my 4-year-old sister was gone,” Thomas said.
Thomas’ father quickly took action and retrieved his daughter, who was walking with another stranger out of the store.
That was Thomas’ first glimpse into human trafficking, one that he credits with inspiring his life’s work of eradicating the illegal industry.
“That leaves a deep, deep impression on you when you’re an 8-year-old child,” Thomas said during a Rotary Club of Columbus meeting Tuesday at Lion Hills Center. “I think that God was priming me to be open to learning about human trafficking and how we can all really make a difference and make the world a better place.”
Thomas’ next encounter with human trafficking came in 2006, when he was touring as the keytarist in a Christian metal band. After reading a flyer about human trafficking, Thomas wanted to learn more.
“So I said ‘Alright, let’s get a team together, and let’s go to India, and let’s see what human trafficking looks like firsthand,” he said.
On that trip, he remembers seeing a 14-year-old girl behind bars, whom he suspected was a human trafficking victim. Police officers were facilitating her abuse, he said.
That experience was all the push Thomas needed to refocus his career on fighting human trafficking.
“When you see this issue, and when you’ve seen real evil in the world – and I’ve seen some real evil in the world behind human trafficking – you can’t look away, and you can’t just pretend that this doesn’t exist,” he said.
Thomas became the statewide anti-trafficking coordinator for Florida and started managing task forces that performed raids. He was eventually invited to ride along during a ride, and what he learned surprised him.
“In the process (of the raid), I realized that there wasn’t a lot of technology to help law enforcement,” Thomas said. “They were manually clicking on these underground websites … looking for this stuff. I thought, as an entrepreneur, there’s got to be a better way to speed this process up.”
Thomas and a team began developing algorithms that could comb the dark web for illicit activity in an effort to expedite the intelligence-gathering process. And with that, Dark Watch was born.
Thomas said different institutions among various industries can use the Dark Watch software to scan and evaluate financial records to find patterns of illegal behavior. The goal is to help those institutions, like banks and hotels, protect themselves from illicit businesses while also cutting off human traffickers who profit from the illegal activity.
“If you think about it, (human trafficking) makes sense from the criminal enterprise, because you can sell that bag of coke or that AK 47 one time,” he said. “You can sell a victim of human trafficking up to 20 times per day. So for them, they’re moving into the industry of sex trafficking, forced prostitution … all these bad things that they’re getting involved in because it’s so lucrative.”
It’s difficult to quantify the impact of the software because that would require partners to report back to Dark Watch, Thomas said. But there have been success stories.
One bank, Thomas said, performed a site visit after Dark Watch provided them data about a potential bad actor.
“When they got there, they found that there were women in beds living in the facility, and they couldn’t believe that that was one of their banking customers,” he said.
The same sort of artificial intelligence software, Thomas believes, could be used to expedite processes on the local level too. It’s an idea he pitched to Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday.
“I think there’s the opportunity to map out any sort of crime,” he said. “But we talked about, could we bring AI to help speed up the process. … Anything on the administrative side that could speed up things, so that they can continue to do the great work they’re doing.”
But eradicating human trafficking takes more than large-scale solutions. Thomas encouraged Rotarians to do their own part in educating their friends, family and fellow community members about how to recognize human trafficking.
“Everybody has the ability to make an impact on human trafficking,” he said. “I hope that it will start with a conversation in your home and your communities and your businesses.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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