One of the most lucrative illegal smuggling activities and most damaging is human trafficking. Because the stakes are so high, track rivers -- traffickers go to extreme lengths to disguise their activities. Research out of San Diego State University indicate that while law enforcement searches Internet ads for keywords, they should also be looking for certain coded emojis. Joining me is Dr. Murray General X.How did you first come to suspect emoticons were being used in Internet ads for sex trafficking?Actually by accident. About a year and a half ago, I do project where we discovered a lot of the keywords. We went into the research and we took 5000 ads out of the back page of passed along. We're going to replicated and see if we can do a better job. We had pulled our data set just last March and noticed that there were a bunch of emojis within the words. The brilliant inside -- insight was that maybe they need something. It turned out that when we did the research with the keywords, the patterns also came up with the emojis. We were able to, like a Rosetta Stone, understand what the emojis meant by looking at the keywords.And you go into a just a little bitI know it is very complicated, but how do you identify a keyword or a key emoji?Way we do the research is we go and scrape data off of the website. What that means is we take the text data and some of the metadata off the website and put into a file. In the file, we now have a big text file that we can use tools to go search it. Originally, we searched using Excel, now we use an AI tool doing machine learning and we were looking for patterns in the words. Looking at the patterns, the emojis fit into the patterns and that's what we discovered what they were actually meaning.What did they actually mean? Can you give us an idea of what a certain emoji might mean in an ad like this?I can tell you a couple of them that were very surprising and unique. One of them was the growing heart. You might have three hearts inside of each other. That meant a minor victim that was being sold. We found a pattern with that. We found a pattern with the use of a plane arrival symbol emoji. That meant a minor victim being sent into sale. The cherry emojis meant the minor child is a virgin. There were just a few that were very common, but the two, the arriving plane, and the growing heart were really the more surprising once.So the sex traffickers are sometimes replacing codewords with emojis to avoid detection by law enforcement?Absolutely. Once we started doing the research, the keywords became fairly obvious. It was relatively easy to do a search. We were lucky to find emojis with the keywords. Now they are just using a lot of just emojis and not the keywords.What about the websites where these ads are being posted. Are they supposed to ban these ads?They are supposed to. But it is difficult. On these pages, there are a lot of legitimate sex worker ads. One of the humorous things is that I got an email this summer from a sex worker union up in Canada, complaining that we need to stop doing our research, could -- because were making life hard for her. They're supposed to ban these ads. They're supposed to be specifically for trafficking, but there so many others that are hiding.'s law enforcement able to respond quickly enough to the changing codes to start looking for emoticons in these ads?We're getting there. I don't believe we're there now. That is why we are using machine language and machine learning algorithms on something we could do almost instantaneously on a continuous basis. We're trying to create a system where we can just apply anytime to the ads, rather than going through the laborious process that we have been doing.You did a report on this and it is published. What are the reports recommendations?Our recommendations are to continue developing the app. That's what our next stage is, to turn it into an app that can just be applied to the advertisements, but also, our recommendations were to apply, not just one indicator of sex trafficking, but about five. The problem is that you get a lot of false positives because of legitimate sex workers. We want to nail it down so we can identify about 8000 that we have a high confidence in sex trafficking. We determined that takes about five indicators to do that.If this research results in saving some of these kids, that must be very satisfying for you.That is our goal. To be honest, we have students that are very passionate about this. Jessica Whitney was the student, the lead student investigator for the last paper. She is very passionate. They both really wanted to do something to benefit kids and society.I have been speaking with Dr. Murray Jennex with San Diego State University. You so much.You are welcome.
Sex traffickers go to extraordinary lengths to disguise their activities, even while they are advertising to the public.
Research out of San Diego State University suggests that while law enforcement searches internet ads for keywords indicating sex trafficking, they should also look for certain coded emojis.
Murray Jennex, Ph.D., who is a professor of management information systems at San Diego State University, led the study. He translated some of the meanings behind the coded emojis.
"And it turned out that when we did the research with the keywords the patterns also came up with the emojis. So we were able to, like a rosetta stone, understand what the emojis meant by looking at the keywords," Jennex said.
He said they figured out a nested heart emoji signifies a minor victim is being offered for sex, while a cherry emoji signifies that minor victim is a virgin.
Jennex said traffickers are using emojis in place of words in online ads as a way to avoid detection by law enforcement.
Jennex joins Midday Edition on Tuesday to discuss the findings of his latest research.
