Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
This is Sarah Holder from The Big Take. This episode contains descriptions of sex trafficking, sexual assault, and child exploitation, so take care while listening. In January of last year, the US Embassy in Colombia issued a warning to all American travelers be careful using dating apps.
Here they noticed that in the past few months there were around eight US citizens who died in measuring in Colombia and some of the popular tourist cities because of meeting people from dating apps.
Eight men had been killed in two months. It turned out that several of these men, after traveling to Medayin, had met women online and gone on dates before being killed. The embassy said some had also possibly been drugged or robbed. Natalie Lung covers tech platforms for Bloomberg, and she says not long after the government advisory, Tinder put out its own warning.
They told people remember to vet your matches, meet in public places, and share with people you know where you're meeting your dates, and at the end, follow your instincts. So that was kind of a rare advisory that Tinder put out because it's almost saying be careful when you're using our apps, which as a profit driven business, you wouldn't usually see a company do that.
Natalie wanted to know more about the mysterious deaths that it pushed Tinder to caution its users so explicitly, so she teamed up with Bloomberg's Antonia Muffaret, who started asking questions of people on the ground.
I really started connecting with people in Columbia, with a private investigator, with a lawyer, with some local experts, and I started asking them, have you heard about this? What is the feeling like in Colombia and mahym specifically, are people speaking about this? What are tourists feeling? And they started saying, yes, this is a big issue and there are people that are getting killed.
Antonia found a much more complicated, much darker situation. While some men were simply looking to date while traveling, others were going to Columbia to engage in prostitution, which is legal there between consenting adults. But some of these men were specifically looking to have sex with miners and they were using apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger to solicit young girls.
There are young girls that are being used that are getting lured into this kind of sex trafficking and are getting sexually exploited, and they are being involved in these meetings with foreigners, and a lot of local experts told me that this was a way more of a bigger issue.
What happened to the men was making international headlines, but the stories of the young girls drawn into the sex trade were not. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today on the show, how people are using apps from US based tech companies to engage in sex trafficking in Colombia and why it's so hard for platforms to stop it. Tourism to Colombia has been booming, especially since the pandemic, when foreigners started flocking to bustling cities like Medeine.
It's located in a valley in the middle of the Andes. People are very kind, the weather is lovely. It's always spring.
Antonio Muffarech went there last summer. She says, for a long time, foreigners associated Colombia with violent crime and drugs, they stayed away, but the country has done a lot to improve its safety record and reputation, and now what used to keep people away is part of.
The draw Bauluscoar, a drug lord used Mayin as the base for his cartel. So this has really brought in a lot of tourists and you can see some of the even the Netflix series Narcos, and there are like Narcos tours and all of those kinds of things in Manjin. Once Biluscar was gone down and some paramilitary groups were stopped, the city started to reinvent itself and they really wanted to bring in another kind of tourism.
But Colombia is also attracting tourists. It doesn't want people who come to the country looking to pay for sex with minors. This trade often involves gangs and a network of patronas who connect foreign clients with women and underage girls.
The situation in Colombia has sadly made it easier for these crimes to occur. It's very important to understand the context in which a lot of people live in poverty. In some areas of Maiyin, where some young girls are not really able to afford lunch every day or they have they live in a household with a single parent who's working all the time and not really able to take care. There are also armed groups and gangs in the city.
Bloomberg Tech reporter Natalie Lung says that another factor facilitating this kind of exploitation has been the rise of apps developed by US tech companies.
Meta's portfolio of apps, including What's App, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram are among the most used social media apps in Colombia and Latin and the number of monthly active users on Facebook in Colombia were equivalent to more than half of the population, and same thing for Airbnb, It's one
of the fastest growing regions for them. In twenty twenty four, that number of Airbnb listings jumped twenty one percent from a year ago, and for Tinder, it's the most popular dating app in Colombia with over half a million of average monthly users, which is three times more than competitor Antonia.
And Natalie found that the apps could be used for many parts of the illicit sex trade. Gangs patronas and their foreign clients might exchange catalogs of women on WhatsApp or Facebook, set meetings through Messenger, and book airbnbs for the encounters.
The gangs really evolved recently within like, for example, WhatsApp or Tinder or Messenger, they really started to harness these tools and use them to commit crimes like, for example, sell drugs, sell weapons, and also offer miners in many of these cases. And this has made it since some of these apps are encrypted, or you can buy a burner phone, or there's so many tactics that you can do to make these crimes really invisible or ghost crimes, that has really made it harder to track down both
the criminals and the victims. So this has really exacerbated the issue and made it way harder to understand how to solve it as well.
Antonio wanted to understand how young girls in Medeine were getting caught up in this illicit trade, how it was affecting them, and where these apps fit in. She connected with a US based NGO called Libertas International, whose mission is to combat sex trafficking in Latin America. The group's founder introduced her to several victims, including Sandra, who was fourteen at the time of the crime, and her younger sister, Veronica, who was twelve. Both names have been changed to protect them.
The sisters had this friend who had nice things like a fancy phone and a motorcycle, and the friend said they could have nice things too.
She mentioned that they could get all of this for selling their virginity. The girls didn't really understood what that meant, but they were like, I mean, sure, it would be great to be able to afford some more food help mother with her rent. Their grandma was sick at the moment. So the girls got connected with a patrona, with someone who connects the girls with a man or a foreigner, in this case through Facebook.
Through a messenger, the patrona told them to wear makeup and revealing clothes a crop top if possible, and.
They eventually went to a place where they met this foreigner alongside another girl, a friend of theirs. For them, it was a very traumatic experience. One of the sisters told me that she just like when the men asked them to start undressing or taking photos and try to do stuff with her. She just asked him to please stop.
The sisters told Antonia. The man didn't stop. They said he groped and kissed Sandra and penetrated Veronica and her friend. He threatened to kill them if they spoke.
Up, and the men refused to pay them. They never heard back from the patrona. She blocked them and they went back home.
Sandra and Veronica never got their money. Natalie says the tech companies that she and ni comment from Airbnb, Facebook and WhatsApp's parent company, Meta, and Match Group with Jones Tinder acknowledge the problem of child's exploitation and abuse on their platforms. In said they were taking steps to fight it.
They're definitely aware that this is happening and they've been working with authorities the mayor on trying to combat these crimes. Match told us that their teams are continuously monitoring accounts and will take immediate action to banning and accounts that violate their terms, and they're also going to continue to engage with the USA Columbian officials to provide them with
information they need to try to find these criminals. And for Meta, it's also similar where they would continue working
with officials and in flagging those efforts. Airbnb has said they're definitely aware that this is happening, and they have worked with the mayor to come up with a plan that includes asking guests to acknowledge their no prostitution policy on the Airbnb platform, and they also recently committed to make donations to a nonprofit organization that would support girls who might be exploited and provide more charity contributions there.
Advocates and local authorities say that while the responsibility for stopping these crimes doesn't fall solely on the platforms, there is more tech companies could do to crack down that's after the break. When Bloomberg's Antonia Muffarech went to the Colombian city of Medaine last summer, she saw evidence of the fight against sex trafficking everywhere.
If you walk through Melain, through, for example, Barghaelleiras, which is the main place where nightlife in Malayin is, you'll see signs almost everywhere saying o jo cento as bartis, which means eyes everywhere, there are a lot of signs saying say no to sex trafficking. It's illegal here, it's illegal in your country as well, in English and in Spanish.
As part of their crackdown, local officials set up a phone line to report cases of sexual exploitation of boys, girls and adolescents, and they're deporting foreigners who've been involved in these crimes.
But as they all said, they really need collaboration from these apps and from these companies.
Bloomberg's Natalie Lung says these companies have become more engaged in this effort over the past year, especially after the US Embassy in Columbia issued its warning about the killings of foreigners and after a high profile case last March of an Ohio man who was found with two miners in his medayine Airbnb.
Obviously, Airbnb does not allow any sort of prostitutional listed activity on their platform, as based on their community policies, but there are people who circumnavigate this by saying my Airbnb is guest friendly, as a euphemism for saying, Okay, they're not going to be any guards. You can, you know, quietly bring someone in.
Airbnb has begun suspending hosts with listings that contain the terms guest friendly, saying it's in violation of their policies.
The tough part is bad actors are always evolving their ways, and even as Airbnb said they have taken down a lot of listings that have guessed friendly in the title, there will still be new ways, you know, new code that people are inventing, and that's part of their company's response there. They're always monitoring how criminal actors are evolving and adapting their ways, so it's definitely tough, you know, how do they pre empt this and understand how criminals are evolving.
As of September, Airbnb said it had removed more than one hundred and fifty listings in Medeyin from its platform for violating community standards and policies, including ones on sex work and sex tourism. The company's website says it may perform limited background checks on US based users if they have the users first name, last name, and date of birth. Still, Natalie says Airbnb hosts believe the company could do more.
She spoke with an Airbnb proprietor whose company operated the rental where that Ohio man was caught with two underage girls. The proprietor said he felt that Airbnb's background check process wasn't adequate.
And as a result of the things that happened in one of his rentals, he had to pay a fine and obviously face a lot of negative press around his property, and that really harmed his business and caused him a lot of stress. And so one of the things definitely they want the apps to be able to do more safety checks in the US. For example, Airbnb is very proactive in banning parties in that way, and they're using AI and different ways to detect if someone is trying
to host a big party on a property. But are there, you know, specific things built in Colombia to prevent these sort of illeg activities. Say they're not doing enough.
Sources told Natalie that Meta's response has limitations too. The company bars adults from starting private conversations with teens who don't follow them or who aren't already connected to them on Messenger and Instagram. It also prevents adults who have been blocked or reported by teens from being able to find or interact with teen accounts. Metas also launched Instagram teen accounts, which will automatically put teens into the most
protective settings. Some of the girls Antonia talked to got around metas protections by setting up a business profile that allowed men to find them using the company's people you May Know feature, which uses algorithms to suggest potential friends. It's a feature a former Facebook engineering director named David erb has been raising specific concerns about.
He was basically describing it's almost like when you move to a new neighborhood, you would check the sex offender registry to see if there are any people around you like that and to avoid them. But Facebook people, you may always kind of doing the opposite and surfacing miners
to adults and meta. On their part, they said they do have safeguards in place where adults who are not connected with certain miners won't be able to see those accounts, and there are ways that they prevent miners from being serviced to adults. But the thing is, if let's say, if some girls are using a business profile, those are totally not protected by the same minor safeguards that are in place.
Digital safety advocates say tech companies should do more to verify their users and introduce additional safety checks because despite the many things these tech companies have done, children are still being exploited on their platforms. The girls Antonia spoke with in Colombia say they hope others aren't drawn in by the promise of making fast money on these apps.
At the end of the day, it's not really worth it and it just leaves a really profound wound. One of the things that I think was really admirable and courageous was speaking to these young girls and how they really wanted to share their stories, hoping that others won't fall into that as well.
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited by Tracy Samuelson and Molly Schwetz. It was fact checked by Adrianna Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sugiura. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemster born Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever
you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
How A mod