Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner Eleanor Lyons has reported that AI and other technologies are fueling a 600% rise in modern slavery and exploitation of UK nationals. A record 23,411 victims were referred to the National Referral Mechanism in 2025, a 22% increase on the previous year and a 617% rise since 2015, driven by AI-enabled scams, deepfakes, synthetic identities, and new forms of digital labour exploitation. Commissioner Lyons highlighted that higher living costs, mounting debt, and insecure employment are making more people vulnerable to traffickers, resulting in significant increases in human trafficking, forced labour, criminal exploitation, and sexual exploitation across the UK.
She noted that individuals facing unaffordable rent, energy bills, or loan repayments are particularly susceptible to offers of seemingly legitimate work that ultimately turn into forced labour or sexual exploitation. One method of digital exploitation targeting children, known as 'debt bonding,' involves perpetrators providing virtual gifts—such as in-game currency or digital items—to create a sense of obligation, which is later exploited to coerce the child into harmful activities. Another tactic, 'remote mothering,' sees an exploiter posing as a protective figure to gain the child’s trust, then using tracking apps and constant digital surveillance to monitor and control their movements.
Lyons noted that these AI-enabled tactics allow traffickers to operate with unprecedented scale and anonymity, making it more challenging for authorities to intervene. Without a change in approach, exploitation will become harder to detect, more digital, and more deeply embedded in everyday economic and social activity, Lyons warned, and technological change is expected to significantly reshape the exploitation landscape through AI-enabled fraud, online sexual exploitation, blackmail, and cryptocurrency laundering, with the commissioner stressing that the scale of the problem was greater than ever and urging comprehensive policy responses, including a coordinated effort from tech companies, law enforcement, and social services to combat the growing menace. The specific AI tools being leveraged by traffickers have not been publicly detailed, though deepfakes and synthetic identities are reportedly common, and the UK government has not yet announced a comprehensive policy response, while the breakdown of how many of the 23,411 referrals involved children versus adults remains undisclosed as of now.