Derek Marsh joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as the two discuss leveraging financial tools and intelligence as core investigative strategies to disrupt human trafficking operations and improve survivor restitution outcomes.

Derek Marsh

Derek Marsh is the Associate Director of the Global Center for Women and Justice and a deputy chief with extensive law enforcement experience. He has been a frequent guest on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast and led a recent roundtable discussion on following the money in human trafficking investigations. His background includes hands-on experience with trafficking investigations and a deep understanding of the collaborative approaches needed to combat these complex crimes.

Key Points

• Financial intelligence serves as a core investigative tool that provides a clearer perspective of criminal organizations than traditional methods relying on confidential informants or victim testimony.


• Sophisticated money laundering patterns include funnel accounts, structured cash deposits, and geographically patterned movements that help traffickers hide the origin and legitimacy of their funds.


• Financial investigations can expose connections between what appear to be separate crimes, revealing larger criminal enterprises rather than isolated “mom and pop” operations.


• Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) generated by banks when they detect unusual deposit patterns provide valuable intelligence for law enforcement agencies investigating trafficking operations.


• Advanced software tools like those from Valid8 Financial can visualize complex transaction flows and present financial data in comprehensible formats for courts, making cases stronger and easier to prosecute.


• Geographic analysis of financial flows reveals high-risk corridors between certain countries that banks monitor for potential criminal activity, such as Nigeria to Italy or Philippines to Europe pathways.


• Human trafficking investigations require multi-agency collaboration because finances cross jurisdictional boundaries as easily as phone calls or internet connections.


• Public-private partnerships with banks, corporations, NGOs, and faith-based organizations create interlocking layers of expertise that strengthen investigations globally.


• Financial tools enable law enforcement to seize assets and freeze accounts tied to trafficking operations, providing funds for survivor restitution that has historically been difficult to collect.


• Using financial intelligence reduces the burden on survivors to testify in court by providing concrete evidence that doesn’t require victim testimony to prove criminal enterprise operations.


• The approach transforms financial intelligence into justice by treating human trafficking fundamentally as a financial crime that exploits people for profit.


• Training law enforcement on financial investigative techniques and providing AI-enhanced tools are essential since most officers lack accounting expertise needed for complex financial analysis.

Resources

• Derek Marsh


• Valid8 Financial


• Roundable Notes (coming soon)


• 341 – Following the Money

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode number 346, leveraging financial tools to disrupt human trafficking. I am very happy to be joined here in the studio by Global Center for Women and Justice Associate Director, deputy Chief Derek Marsh.

[00:00:28 ] We have been working together for a very long time and he’s been a frequent guest here on the podcast, so I’m not going to include a bio, but you can go back to the website and learn more from his perspective. By just searching our episodes with the name Derek Marsh. So we’re gonna dive right into the financial aspects.

[00:00:53 ] We recently interviewed David Tyree on following the money and we talked to, um, district attorney Ryann Jorban along the same lines.

[00:01:05 ] Today we’re going to look at this from a broader perspective, after having had a round table on following the money here at Vanguard University led by Derek Marsh, and let’s just get some understanding of what the key strategies and insights are.

[00:01:26 ] That we were able to glean from that round table, and that will lead us into some action steps. So welcome Derek.

[00:01:45 ] Derek Marsh: Thanks for having me again, Sandie.

[00:01:47 ] Sandie Morgan: So, who else was at the table?

[00:01:50 ] Derek Marsh: Well, besides you and myself, David Tyree, our expert from the, retired DEA agent, but also working with Valid8 Financial. Now, we also had Ryann Jorban, who’s an A DEA with Los Angeles, District Attorney’s Office, but we were also lucky enough to have a couple professors from here at Vanguard University.

[00:02:09 ] Professor Julius Angbor, who is a marketing and business expert, specifically in international business issues, focusing mostly in Africa and that region of the world. We also had assistant professor, Dr. Thomas Ropel, who was a retired FBI agent, who was able to focus on the collaborative strategies used by the federal agencies to work on human trafficking and exploitation types of investigations.

[00:02:35 ] We were also lucky to have assistant director of the US Department of Labor Wage in our division, Paul Chang, who was one of our favorites we’ve had on before. Uh, and he was able to discuss specifics about labor trafficking, where we’re finding a lot of labor trafficking occurring and how that process occurs.

[00:02:53 ] And we were also able to have, members, from Valid8 Financial actually show up and discuss their software and give us a demonstration to show how all these. incredible amounts of data that would take a regular person, you know, hours if not weeks, to put together their software is able to put together in a matter of minutes.

[00:03:12 ] It was amazing. So, we had a good group of people who we could discuss this with. And, and finally, I don’t wanna lose this out obviously, but we had, Linh Tran, who is our task force administrator, In charge of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force has been for years, ever since even I was there.

[00:03:30 ] So that’s like dating myself or dating her, I’m not sure which, and finally we had, of course, John Cotton Richmond, who, was gracious enough to spend some time with us. He was our, previous human trafficking, czar, maybe that’s the wrong word to use, but that’s, you know, our previous human trafficking, director for the United States and the State Department.

[00:03:52 ] And he was also, actively participating in, in the discussion helping us understand, uh, federal perspectives and where we’re moving forward with financial investigations and the financial tools that can be used.

[00:04:05 ] Sandie Morgan: And, and I think this round table demonstrated how broad the element of following the money as across our movement.

[00:04:18 ] We’re looking at law enforcement, we’re looking at prosecutors, but there’s also this sense that the element of restitution is more attainable for better victim outcomes, and that’s what drove me. You all know my background in pediatric nursing, so a lot of this was foreign language for me. So while Derek and I break down an executive summary of what happened at that round table, I’m the one whoDoesn’t understand even what a forensic accountant does.

[00:04:54 ]  So I’m gonna help stop him when it sounds a little too complicated so that I can put it into my normal context. Is that okay with you, Derek?

[00:05:11 ] Derek Marsh: Perfectly okay. Frankly, I don’t wanna pretend I’m an accountant at heart either, but I, I do love the numbers and I, I love the fact that, uh, numbers don’t lie. That the reality is that they can hide things, hide people, hide locations, hide phone numbers. But when you get ahold of the accounts and you’re able to track those accounts and where money’s moving, it really gives you a crystal clear perspective of the

[00:05:33 ] criminal organization that is running any kind of a human trafficking operation.

[00:05:39 ] Sandie Morgan: So our first. Key strategy is built around the aspect of financial intelligence as a core investigative tool. And when I first started hearing the group around the table talk about financial intelligence, I kind of reduced it to my understanding of, oh, we need financial literacy. And then I began to see there was a huge world I had never explored, and that is an area of data that, we need to understand.

[00:06:18 ] Can you unpack that for us?

[00:06:20 ] Derek Marsh: I will try. Again, Um, still getting to know, some specifics about this, but lemme go back to a time when I was actually wearing uniform and we were doing investigations where we would run into these sex trafficking operations, labor trafficking organizations, and

[00:06:36 ] we would look for money. We really couldn’t find that much of it. And we’re trying to figure out why is that? We know money’s a major, major motivator for this, and saving money’s great, but we know that they were also producing money and we just couldn’t seem to get a hold of it. Understanding that financial intelligence as a core investigative tool kind of flipped the switch for me.

[00:06:54 ] As far as perspective with the idea is instead of looking at any organization is basically a financial, Method to which finances are moved. You know, places are supp