Tech Giants Have Facilitated An Online Slavery Market

The US technology industry is under criticism for helping the global slave trade thrive. Its critics argue it should be held accountable for facilitating the barbarous practice. 

Posing as a husband and wife, a team from the BBC News Arabic service found it was disturbingly easy to discover human traffickers selling slaves online on Instagram and other popular apps. “In the Gulf, women employed as domestic workers are being sold online via apps approved and provided by Google and Apple,” the investigators say in a video they recently released. “It’s been called an online slave market.” 

The BBC Arabic undercover investigation found that domestic workers are being illegally bought and sold online in a booming black market. Kept behind closed doors, deprived of their basic rights, they are unable to leave and at risk of being sold to the highest bidder. But pick up a smartphone and you can scroll through thousands of their pictures, categorised by race, and available to buy for a few thousand dollars.

Some of the trade has been carried out on Facebook-owned Instagram, where posts have been promoted via algorithm-boosted hashtags, and sales negotiated via private messages. Other listings have been promoted in apps approved and provided by Google Play and Apple's App Store, as well as the e-commerce platforms' own websites. 

Google and Apple said they were working with app developers to prevent illegal activity.

The illegal sales are a clear breach of the US tech firms' rules for app developers and users. However, the BBC has found there are many related listings still active on Instagram, and other apps available via Apple and Google.

Slave Market
Nine out of 10 Kuwaiti homes have a domestic worker, they come from some of the poorest parts of the world to the Gulf, aiming to make enough money to support their family at home. Posing as a couple newly arrived in Kuwait, the BBC Arabic undercover team spoke to 57 app users and visited more than a dozen people who were trying to sell them their domestic worker via a popular commodity app called 4Sale. 

The sellers almost all advocated confiscating the women's passports, confining them to the house, denying them any time off and giving them little or no access to a phone.

Human Rights Violated
The team were urged by app users, who acted as if they were the "owners" of these women, to deny them other basic human rights, such as giving them a "day or a minute or a second" off.  One man, a policeman, told the BBC team how domestic workers were used as a commodity.  "You will find someone buying a maid for 600 KD ($2,000), and selling her on for 1,000 KD ($3,300)," he said.

Sponsor's Permission
In most places in the Gulf, domestic workers are brought into the country by agencies and then officially registered with the government.  Potential employers pay the agencies a fee and become the official sponsor of the domestic worker. Under what is known as the Kafala system, a domestic worker cannot change or quit her job, nor leave the country without her sponsor's permission. 

In 2015, Kuwait introduced some of the most wide-ranging laws to help protect domestic workers - but the law was not popular with everyone.  Apps including 4Sale and Instagram enable employers to sell the sponsorship of their domestic workers to other employers, for a profit. This bypasses the agencies, and creates an unregulated black market which leaves women more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

This online slave market is not just happening in Kuwait. In Saudi Arabia, the investigation found hundreds of women being sold on Haraj, another popular commodity app. There were hundreds more on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. 

BBCreporters travelled to Guinea to try to contact the family of Fatou, the child they had discovered being offered for sale in Kuwait.  Every year hundreds of women are trafficked from here to the Gulf as domestic workers. Fatou was found by the Kuwaiti authorities and taken to the government-run shelter for domestic workers. Two days later she was deported back to Guinea for being a minor. 

Hashtag Removed
The Kuwaiti government says it is "at war with this kind of behaviour" and insisted the apps would be "heavily scrutinised". To date, no significant action has been taken against the platform. There has not been any legal action against the woman who tried to sell Fatou. Since the BBC team contacted the apps and tech companies about their findings, 4Sale has removed the domestic worker section of its platform.

The firms continue to distribute the 4Sale and Haraj apps, however, on the basis that their primary purpose is to sell legitimate goods and services. 

4Sale may have tackled the problem, but at the time of publication, hundreds of domestic workers were still being traded on Haraj, Instagram and other apps which the BBC has seen.

Futurism:            BBC

You Might Also Read:

Websites To Be Fined Over 'online harms' Under New UK Law:

Instagram Allows Users To Download Everything Shared:

 

« Cyber Crime Is An Increasing Risk For Charities
Cyber Insurance Might Actually Encourage Attacks »

Infosecurity Europe
CyberSecurity Jobsite
Perimeter 81

Directory of Suppliers

Syxsense

Syxsense

Syxsense brings together endpoint management and security for greater efficiency and collaboration between IT management and security teams.

BackupVault

BackupVault

BackupVault is a leading provider of automatic cloud backup and critical data protection against ransomware, insider attacks and hackers for businesses and organisations worldwide.

Directory of Cyber Security Suppliers

Directory of Cyber Security Suppliers

Our Supplier Directory lists 7,000+ specialist cyber security service providers in 128 countries worldwide. IS YOUR ORGANISATION LISTED?

Infosecurity Europe, 3-5 June 2025, ExCel London

Infosecurity Europe, 3-5 June 2025, ExCel London

This year, Infosecurity Europe marks 30 years of bringing the global cybersecurity community together to further our joint mission of Building a Safer Cyber World.

ZenGRC

ZenGRC

ZenGRC (formerly Reciprocity) is a leader in the GRC SaaS landscape, offering robust and intuitive products designed to make compliance straightforward and efficient.

Integrity360

Integrity360

Integrity360 provide fully managed IT security services as well as security testing, integration, GRC and incident handling services.

Cybersixgill

Cybersixgill

Cybersixgill was founded with a single mission: to protect organizations against malicious cyber attacks that come from the deep and dark web, before they materialize.

Cybersecurity Innovation Hub

Cybersecurity Innovation Hub

The main objective of the Hub is to bring cybersecurity and other advanced technologies closer to companies and as a result help to increase their performance as Industry 4.0.

Grupo CFI

Grupo CFI

Grupo CFI is the largest Spanish network of data protection and cybersecurity professionals.

Lepide

Lepide

LepideAuditor is a powerful Data Security Platform that enables you to reduce risk, prevent data breaches and prove regulatory compliance.

M2SYS

M2SYS

M2SYS is a worldwide leader in identification and authentication solutions.

MicroEJ

MicroEJ

MicroEJ is a software vendor of cost-driven solutions for embedded and IoT devices.

Cybots

Cybots

Cybots is a multinational cyber defence brand founded in Singapore in 2018 to help organizations stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats from cyber criminals.

Wazuh

Wazuh

Wazuh is a free, open source and enterprise-ready security monitoring solution for threat detection, integrity monitoring, incident response and compliance.

AB Handshake

AB Handshake

AB Handshake offers a game-changing solution for telecom service providers that eliminates fraud on inbound and outbound voice traffic.

IONOS

IONOS

IONOS is a leading provider of cloud infrastructure, cloud services, and hosting with more than 8.5 million customers contracts.

ELK Analytics

ELK Analytics

ELK Analytics is a specialized Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) that focuses on endpoint security and monitoring & alerting for any type of structured or unstructured data.

HYCU

HYCU

HYCU was born of the need to simplify data protection and provide equivalent levels of backup and recovery support across on premises, public cloud, and SaaS workloads.

Layer 8 Security

Layer 8 Security

Layer 8 Security is a cybersecurity advisory, consulting, and technical services firm that arms businesses with practical compliance, risk management, and security program strategies.

Tria Federal

Tria Federal

Tria Federal is the premier middle-market Technology and Advisory services provider delivering digital transformation solutions to federal health and public safety agencies.

Scinary Cybersecurity

Scinary Cybersecurity

Scinary was founded in 2015 on the premise that cybersecurity should not be limited to just large corporations or large government entities.