Human trafficking at industrial scale is not a metaphor or a journalistic flourish. It is the precise legal definition of what is being done to North Korean citizens in Russia right now. A twenty-hour workday. Locked dormitories with checkpoint regimes. Permanent surveillance by intelligence officers. Family members held as hostages back home. And in the worker's pocket — barely enough for a pack of cigarettes. An investigation by Trace Investigations, conducted jointly with the South Korean Citizen Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, has for the first time laid out the full mechanics of this scheme: who supplies, who buys, who takes a cut, and through exactly which bank the money flows.
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