Human trafficking for the purpose of forcing victims to commit crimes is rising across Europe and demands urgent government action to protect victims and prevent their prosecution, the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings said Friday in its 15th annual report.

The monitoring body, known as GRETA, said trafficking for criminal exploitation is frequently intertwined with other forms of organized crime, including drug trafficking, property crime, migrant smuggling, money laundering, document and payment-card fraud, and cybercrime.

Victims are typically recruited online through job postings, service advertisements, gaming sites, and social media, after which communications move to end-to-end encrypted messaging that lets traffickers control victims remotely, according to the report, which covers GRETA’s 2025 monitoring work. 

Perpetrators coerce their victims by blackmailing them with compromising images or by fostering drug dependency and debt. Traffickers often exploit such vulnerabilities as poverty, homelessness, precarious migration status, disability, and addiction, with unaccompanied minors and children in residential care at particular risk, the council said. 

Citing the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2024 global report, GRETA said forced criminality has become the third-largest form of trafficking by detected victims worldwide, climbing from one percent of detected victims in 2016 to eight percent in 2022, and accounting for 22 percent of all detected victims in Western and Southern Europe.

Country data in the report show wide variation. In the United Kingdom, criminal exploitation accounted for roughly a third of presumed victims referred to the National Referral Mechanism in 2021-2024 and was the leading form of exploitation of child victims, predominantly affecting British children tied to “county lines” drug networks. 

In Croatia, forced criminality represented nearly a third of police-identified victims in 2020-2024, while it accounted for roughly 15 percent of identified victims in Denmark, where authorities reported networks exploiting Vietnamese men to cultivate cannabis on remote farms, and between seven percent and 15 percent in Albania, Moldova, and the Netherlands.

By contrast, GRETA found the phenomenon underrepresented or entirely absent from statistics in several states, including countries such as Austria, Bulgaria, and Latvia whose national trafficking definitions do not expressly cover criminal exploitation. The report also recounted large-scale online fraud cases detected in Croatia, Montenegro, and Slovenia in 2018-2019, in which victims recruited from Taiwan were held captive, stripped of travel documents and trained to run impersonation scams targeting Chinese nationals.

The findings bear directly on the non-punishment provision of the Council of Europe anti-trafficking convention, which requires states to allow for victims not to be penalized for unlawful acts they were compelled to commit. Of the 47 states evaluated, 22 have adopted specific non-punishment provisions, a number GRETA said has grown following its recommendations but remains incomplete. 

Failures persist in practice, however, the council noted. In France, 94 percent of forced-criminality victims assisted by NGOs in 2024 were prosecuted for acts committed during their exploitation, and 76 percent had been convicted at least once, according to the report. GRETA pointed to the European Court of Human Rights’ V.C.L. and A.N. v. United Kingdom judgment, which found the UK violated the rights of two Vietnamese children prosecuted for drug offenses despite credible trafficking indicators.