ACAMS Today sat down with Jinisha Bhatt for International Women’s Day 2025. She is an anti-financial crime (AFC) investigator specializing in multi-jurisdictional cryptocurrency fraud, money laundering and human trafficking (HT) investigations. She is passionate about addressing the human cost of financial crime, believing that “most crimes against humanity, society and the environment have a pecuniary motive. Fighting these crimes through a financial lens is how I get to make a small dent in the universe.”
As a compliance consultant for digital asset and fintech organizations in the U.S. and Canada, Bhatt conducts large-scale cryptocurrency fraud investigations, including pig butchering schemes. In addition, she provides expert witness testimony. Previously, she contributed to Kraken Exchange’s compliance function, conducting financial crime investigations to meet regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
Bhatt also founded the Canada Anti-Human Trafficking Consortium (CAHTC)1 and collaborates with law enforcement (LE) and private-sector entities to enhance HT victim identification and prosecution rates. By leveraging publicly available data, CAHTC delivers actionable intelligence to LE.
In addition to investigations, Bhatt is a frequent moderator, panelist and speaker, educating audiences on cryptocurrency compliance, anti-money laundering regulations and financial crime.
Committed to integrity, Bhatt ensures her personal actions align with her professional principles. She actively avoids goods and services linked to modern slavery, wildlife trafficking or environmental harm and supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Target 8.7: eradicating forced labor and modern slavery.
ACAMS Today (AT): What inspired you to focus your career on combating financial crimes, particularly at the intersection of money laundering, cryptocurrency fraud and HT?
Jinisha Bhatt (JB): Early on in my career, I worked at financial institutions (FIs) that were exposed to criminal elements. Even though these Fis where centered in financial crime detection, they did not actually lead to significant positive change in this collective fight.
As a result, a paradigm shift led me to see the untapped potential of data-gathering and intel-sharing. My primary motivation to transition into crypto investigations was traceability and speed of transactions. Before I made the transition, I invested in a blockchain forensics designation and found myself beguiled by the infrastructure and the shared ethos of the crypto compliance community at large. While many financial crime typologies are similar in traditional and decentralized finance, as an investigator, I had more transactional data at my disposal in the crypto space by virtue of distributed ledgers and block explorers. I also found myself conducting faster and proactive investigations while collaborating with compliant crypto platforms.
AT: This year’s International Women’s Day theme is “#AccelerateAction.” How does this resonate with your work in financial crime prevention, and what actions do you believe are most urgent?
JB: First, let us please acknowledge that raising awareness alone is not mobilizing change and eliciting true cooperation. Grappling with this idea provided the impetus for my work and nonprofit endeavors. I believe we must leverage data to illuminate the magnitude and nature of the epidemic that is financial crime.
We must appreciate what data can teach us about systemic failures in the financial sector. The AFC industry must confront the fact that we have not been able to markedly curb the amount of proceeds being laundered even though we are producing a record number of suspicious activity reports each year and building sophisticated tools to detect suspicious activity. As per the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, less than 1% of proceeds of crime are seized,2 while criminals are rarely prosecuted, and victims are rarely compensated.
This is a clarion call for a fundamental shift in our approach. We need to urgently focus on collaboration, timely data-sharing and collectively fixate on prosecuting criminals who go scot-free.
First, we must humanize victims of financial crime. Financial crimes often disproportionately impact women and marginalized groups, exacerbating existing inequalities. Urgent action is needed to develop and implement persona-specific detection methodologies that address the unique risk factors and realities intersectional groups face in their daily lives.
Then, we should focus on asset recovery and victim restitution. While we have been focused on detecting and preventing crime, we need to invest in empowering victims and creating meaningful financial inclusion. It is believed that an average survivor of human trafficking is revictimized between five to 13 times before they are emancipated. The national recidivism rate for women with prostitution-related offenses in the U.S. is about 80%.3 As a result, victims of sex trafficking and financial coercion are financially excluded by institutions, making them vulnerable to financial crimes such as forced criminality and fraud.
Finally, we need to strengthen legal frameworks. Accelerating the implementation and enforcement of laws that protect vulnerable groups from financial exploitation and ensure equal protection under the law is required.
AT: Can you share a specific success story from your work with CAHTC that reflects the importance of accelerating action in combating HT?
JB: During Super Bowl LVII in 2023, a group of volunteers (who would later join CAHTC) and I led the open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigations team to support a nonprofit victim extraction mission. We scraped thousands of escort ads to analyze the most egregious ones and potentially identify victims who may want to be extracted.
Our partner’s outreach team left voicemails and text messages to one of the phone numbers we had scraped. After leaving voicemails and text messages to a phone number in our dataset, our partners received a call back from a single mother. She had researched our nonprofit partner’s background and had decided to ask for help.
The woman was an interesectionally vulnerable victim of a brutally abusive guerilla pimp4 who had been forcing her to inject hard drugs. Her activities were constantly monitored by a heavily organized drug, weapons and sex trafficking network. Her trafficker regularly threatened to use force against her children if she did not comply with his demands to make a few thousand dollars every day. Her phone was also being monitored.
After a particularly violent beating, she had decided to take a screenshot of a text message she received from our partner and shared it with a friend via Snapchat. This allowed her the opportunity to delete any messages exchanged between us. Once safe, she retrieved our partner’s toll-free number from her friend and called to request an immediate pickup. She asked our partners to bring baby clothes, food and diapers on their way. Within hours, our partners were able to pick her up along with her two children and bring them to a safe house.
When I think about this family, I cannot help but ruminate over the opportunities we have to identify and protect victims by galvanizing society into accelerated action.
AT: How do financial crimes like HT disproportionately impact women and girls, and what can AFC professionals do to address this disparity?
JB: Women and girls account for 71% of all trafficked victims detected globally, with young girls representing almost three-quarters of identified child trafficking victims5. Females represent 96% of victims trafficked for sexual exploitation, which is the most predominant form of global trafficking currently detected, accounting for 54% of all forms of trafficking.4
Women and girls are also more vulnerable to exploitation during conflicts, post-conflict settings, and humanitarian crises due to the absence of the rule of law.
To address this disparity, AFC professionals can take several actions:
Enhance intersectional-specific detection methodologies: Develop and implement programs that address the unique risk factors and realities of intersectionality-vulnerable groups in their daily lives, including experiences of victimization and practical difficulties.
Appreciate the nuances of forced criminality: Women and particularly victims of HT are often forced to commit financial crime while compromising their own credit history. FIs could engage with survivors to ensure victims are not unintentionally excluded from the financial system.
Cross-train: AFC professionals could enhance their understanding of gender-specific financial crime by adopting a holistic mindset and investigating epistemologies not commonly used in a conventional AFC career. For instance, many volunteers at CAHTC.org constantly learn about new HT and fraud typologies by engaging in OSINT investigations.
Adopt a cross-sectoral framework: While we systemically struggle to enhance interagency cooperation and regulatory alignment, as individuals we could build pathways to engage with as many stakeholders as we can to actively fight against financial crime.
AT: What message would you like to share with women in the AFC community on International Women’s Day, and how can they contribute to accelerating action in their respective roles?
JB: There are several ways women in the AFC space can make a difference.
They can create opportunities for survivors. Women in the AFC community are best equipped to close the divide between virtue signaling and meaningful action by demanding and leading change. When they find themselves in leadership positions, they could use their privilege to architect programs to create more opportunities for survivors and advocate for products that enhance financial inclusion across the board.
This can spark a bottom-up movement. If they happen to be in the second line of defense, they must not wait for the tone from the top to change. Change can be created through a bottom-up approach if a group of committed human beings align their actions with the corporate values they espouse and demand clear action from the top.
They can evaluate corporate values. When choosing a job, women could look more closely at their prospective employers’ environmental social governance commitments and evaluate claims of tangible impact. I want to highlight the difference between virtue signaling and tangible change. Many FIs appear to be optical allies of survivors without making a marginal investment in the growth and inclusion of survivors in the financial system.
They can acknowledge their role. We should acknowledge that we too are complicit in perpetuating modern slavery when we opt to patronize exploitative businesses and practices. The majority of the goods we consume are slave-tainted.6 It is up to us to learn the origin of the products we consume, take a clear stance against labor and sexual exploitation, and vote with our dollars. This generation of financial crime fighters has the burden and the opportunity to end the cycle of exploitation.
They can take a stance against willful blindness. Any exposure to HT entities should be immediately demarketed. Recent history has illustrated that well-known human traffickers have enjoyed many privileges at storied institutions with entrenched impunity. Women must unite and resist willful ignorance at any cost.
AT: In addition to CAHTC, is there another nonprofit you support to benefit your community?
JB: I support several survivor leaders on their journey to economic and social mobilization. I support Amnesty International’s efforts to defend human rights across the world.
I contribute to a Canadian youth-led organization called One Child7 that empowers youth to take action against sexual exploitation.
I also contribute to a Wyoming-based nonprofit called Uprising8 in their efforts to curate actionable educational events for the greater anti-trafficking community.
Interviewed by: Karla Monterrosa-Yancey, CAMS, editor-in-chief, ACAMS, editor@acams.org
Ben Bahner, CAMS, editor, ACAMS, bbahner@acams.org
- “Our Story,” Canada Anti-Human Trafficking Consortium, https://www.fighthumantrafficking.ca
- “Money Laundering,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html
- Emmylou Manwill, “Human Trafficking Courts: Diversion to or From Justice?” Human Trafficking Institute, Apr 1, 2020, https://traffickinginstitute.org/human-trafficking-courts-diversion-to-or-from-justice/
- A guerilla (or gorilla) pimp is pimp who controls his victims almost entirely through physical violence and force. See: “Language in ‘The Life’,” CT.gov, https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/dcf/humantrafficking/schools/language-in-the-life.pdf
- “The Gender Dimensions of Human Trafficking,” Inter-Agency Coordination Group Against Trafficking in Persons, September 2017, https://icat.un.org/sites/g/files/tmzbdl461/files/publications/icat-ib-04-v.1.pdf
- “Global Slavery Index: Understanding the scale of modern slavery,” Walk Free, https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
- “OneChild homepage, OneChild.ca, https://www.onechild.ca/
- “Uprising homepage,” Uprising, https://uprisingwyo.org/
