A year ago, on the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, Dr Marek Benio wrote on this website that legal employment is the best prevention against invisible enslavement “International Day Against Trafficking in Human Beings (30 July)” (article in Polish). He warned that bureaucratic barriers to the legal employment of foreign nationals do not stop migration – they merely push it underground, making Poland an increasingly attractive destination country for human traffickers. That warning has lost none of its relevance. If anything, this year’s theme set by UNODC shows just how precisely it has played out.
The 2026 theme: “Trapped behind the scam”
The United Nations has announced that this year’s World Day Against Trafficking in Persons (30 July) campaign is titled “Trapped behind the scam.” UNODC is drawing attention to the growing scale of trafficking in persons for forced criminality: victims are recruited through fraudulent job advertisements promising legitimate employment abroad, transported to illegal compounds, and coerced – under threat of violence, through quotas, debt bondage and surveillance – into running online fraud operations: romance scams, cryptocurrency fraud, and other schemes that target victims around the world. In East and South-East Asia alone, financial losses from such scams in 2023 are estimated at between USD 18 and 37 billion.
The recruitment mechanism here is the key point: once again, it is a job offer – albeit a fraudulent one – that opens the door to enslavement. This is exactly the point Dr Benio made a year ago in relation to forced labour in Poland: the line between safe labour migration and human trafficking very often comes down to whether a fast, transparent, legal route to employment is available, or whether the only path left runs through intermediaries operating in the grey zone.
What has changed since last year
The diagnosis in last year’s article has not merely stood the test of time – it has been borne out in practice. The European Labour Authority (ELA) report Posting of third-country nationals: Contracting chains, recruitment patterns, and enforcement issues (Luxembourg, 2025), published a few weeks after Dr Benio’s article, describes the very same mechanisms across the whole of the EU: long subcontracting chains, opaque recruitment practices, and weaknesses in enforcement systems that leave third-country workers posted to the EU particularly exposed to exploitation.
At the same time, ELMI has spent months pointing out that administrative barriers to legal labour mobility – rather than protecting the labour market – push honest companies and workers outside the system. In March 2026, the Institute submitted an open letter to the Polish Prime Minister’s Office, signed by legal scholars and EU law experts, warning that the practice of Polish authorities is blocking PLN 32 billion worth of service exports and breaching the EU’s freedom to provide services. This is not a separate issue from human trafficking – it is the same problem seen from the other side: when the legal route for posting workers and employing foreign nationals becomes harder to access, intermediaries who “help” – at the cost of the victim’s freedom – gain more room to operate.
Why this still concerns all of us
Human trafficking rarely looks the way the imagination suggests. It is rarely an abduction; far more often it is a confiscated passport, unpaid wages, a debt owed to a “guardian,” and a false promise – of a job, of transport, of a better life. In the 2025 version of this story, that was work on a construction site, in agriculture, in care work. In the 2026 version described by UNODC, it might be a job “in a call centre abroad” or “at an international IT company” – the advertisement looks professional, but instead of an office, a guarded compound awaits, along with a forced obligation to defraud the next victims, thousands of kilometres away.
The common denominator remains the one Dr Benio pointed to: every legal, efficient employment procedure is one less opportunity for traffickers. Every job advertisement that can be verified through a legal, transparent recruitment channel is one less trap.
A reminder: what human trafficking means in law
Article 3(a) of the Palermo Protocol defines trafficking in persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons through threats, abduction, fraud or the abuse of a position of vulnerability, for the purpose of exploitation – including forced labour or services. The Polish Criminal Code (Article 115 § 22 and Article 189a § 1) mirrors this definition and provides for a penalty of imprisonment from 3 to 20 years for trafficking in human beings.
What comes next
ELMI consistently points to one conclusion: the most effective preventive tool against human trafficking is a fast, transparent and accessible legal pathway for employing foreign nationals and for the mobility of workers under the EU’s freedom to provide services. This year’s theme – trapped behind the scam – is a reminder that the front line of this fight shifts along with the methods used by criminals, but the solution stays the same: a system in which every person – no matter where they have travelled from – has real access to work with dignity.
Dr Marek Benio’s original 2025 article – “Legal employment is the best prevention against invisible enslavement” – is available here (in Polish).
Sources: UNODC, World Day Against Trafficking in Persons (2026 theme: “Trapped behind the scam”), unodc.org/endht; European Labour Authority (ELA), Posting of third-country nationals: Contracting chains, recruitment patterns, and enforcement issues, Publications Office of the EU, Luxembourg 2025; ELMI, News (March 2026).
