Youngbee Dale joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to explain how traffickers run commercial sexual exploitation as a business, hiding it behind storefronts, shell companies, and cash, and why identifying victims often comes down to asking what they’re being charged for.

Youngbee Dale

Youngbee Dale is an anti-trafficking consultant, researcher, trainer, and expert witness whose work focuses on the commercial sex market in the United States, with particular expertise in Asian and Korean sex trafficking, illicit massage businesses, organized crime, money laundering, visa fraud, tax evasion, and financial crime indicators connected to exploitation. As CEO of Dale Consulting, LLC, she trains and consults for law enforcement, prosecutors, financial crime professionals, courts, policymakers, government agencies, and victim service providers. Her clients have included the New York State Human Trafficking Intervention Court Conference, the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists, the FBI Southern District of New York, the NYPD Human Trafficking Case Unit, and several state trafficking commissions and task forces. Earlier she served as an NGO liaison to the FBI Norfolk Office and worked with Gonggam Public Law Office in Seoul, Korea. Her peer-reviewed research appears in Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence. She holds an M.A. from Regent University.

Key Points

• Traffickers treat commercial sexual exploitation as a business model where the goal is profit, so disrupting it means following the money back to the person actually running the operation.
• Because anti-trafficking work has centered on victims, there is far less research on the financial crime, immigration fraud, and business structures traffickers rely on to operate.
• Networks tend to follow their own cultural business patterns, so Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese operations launder money and handle payment differently, such as cash-only Chinese parlors versus credit-and-cash Korean ones.
• “Know your customer” (KYC) analysis helps investigators recognize trafficking transaction patterns, which look different for domestic minor sex trafficking than for Asian illicit massage businesses tied to grocery stores, real estate, title agencies, or restaurants.
• Following cash often means tracing it from the parlor through couriers to a profiteer who deposits it into business accounts or shell corporations, sometimes linked through shared addresses or property owned by family.
• The questions that surface exploitation today focus on deductions, hidden fees, fines, wages, and debt bondage, since traffickers have moved past older controls like passport confiscation and forced on-site living.
• A South Korean trafficker told Dale that operators fear the Department of Labor more than vice units, because wage and deduction questions can make a woman realize she is being exploited.
• Stronger cases require offender-focused research, updated training, forensic accounting, and collaboration among prosecutors, the US attorney, and local law enforcement, who often lack funding for complex financial investigations.

Resources

• Dale Consulting — Youngbee Dale’s consulting firm and primary website.
• Money Laundering in the Commercial Sex Market in the United States
• Visa Fraud in the Commercial Sex Market in the United States: An Overview
• Tax Evasion and Fraud in the United States Sex Market
• Beyond Massage Parlors: Exposing the Korean Commercial Sex Market in the United States

Transcript

[00:00:00] Youngbee Dale: Chinese traffickers will never operate like Vietnamese or Korean or Hispanic traffickers, just like the Hispanic traffickers will never operate like Chinese, Vietnamese or any other traffickers.

[00:00:19] Elisha: Sometimes the question that exposes exploitation is not, “Did they take your passport?” but, “What are they charging you for?” Youngbee Dale explains that traffickers often adapt faster than our training does. That means victims can stay hidden when we only look for older signs of control instead of asking about deductions, fines, debt, wages, and who is really profiting.

[00:00:39] Hi, I’m Elisha. I’m a student here at Vanguard, and I help produce the show. Today, Sandie talks with Youngbee Dale, CEO of Dale Consulting and an anti-trafficking consultant with expertise in financial crime, visa fraud, and Asian and Korean commercial sex markets. And now, here’s their conversation.

[00:00:59] Sandie Morgan: Youngbee Dale, I am so excited to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. Welcome.

[00:01:06] Youngbee Dale: Thank you.

[00:01:07] Sandie Morgan: I have been reading about your work, and I’ve seen so many places where you and I have overlapped over the decades, and we know some of the same people, and yet we have never met in person.

[00:01:23] But I think we’re going to change that.

[00:01:25] Youngbee Dale: Yep.

[00:01:27] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So let’s start off. You are an expert witness in financial crime, and I’ve always been fascinated with crime analysts. I’ve thought, “Wow, if I was younger, I’d go back to school and become a crime analyst.” But you are very focused on financial crime as an anti-trafficking tool.

[00:01:56] So what can financial crime investigations teach us and reveal about trafficking networks that may not be visible through our traditional victim identification methods?

[00:02:15] Youngbee Dale: So first of all, when you look at the literature that interviews lots of traffickers and their facilitators, a lot of the time, and this is cross-cultural too, including the traffickers that I interview, they look at human trafficking not so much as exploitation, or something to explore their fantasy.

[00:02:38] They’re not looking at trafficking as a rapist looking at rape or sexual assault. They’re looking at trafficking as more of a business model. This is a business for them. It has nothing to do with exploitation. It happens to be exploitation. They make more money, that’s great, but at the end of the day, for them it’s about money.

[00:02:57] So that’s why I think, if eye for eye, right? If it’s about money, then we need to tackle their illicit assets.

[00:03:05] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so where do you begin to, quote-unquote, “tackle their illicit assets”?

[00:03:13] Youngbee Dale: We’ve been advocating for a victim-centered approach, which often in itself you don’t have any problem with, except that because we’ve been focusing on the victim-centered approach, I don’t think we have a lot of research when it comes to looking at financial crime, or immigration fraud, or anything that the criminal, the traffickers, actually need to operate successful human trafficking business models.

[00:03:40] So a lot of the time, especially in the East Asian culture, they don’t really know who their real, actual traffickers are, and this is done on purpose. This is intended to be the case. A trafficker as a business person, like a restaurant owner, is not going to tell every single detail about how this work, the business, works, where he is hiding money, how he’s bringing women, and all these details.

[00:04:06] Not going to reveal that, just like the restaurant owner will not reveal every single detail to the waitress, right? But the only way to trace back to the offender, the real trafficker, is to follow the money. The money has to go back to the trafficker, otherwise the trafficker has no business being involved in exploitation one way or the other.

[00:04:26] Sandie Morgan: So it is driven by profits, by greed. So when you talk about the Asian culture, you’ve done a lot of work on Asian and Korean, specifically, commercial sex markets in the US, and I know locally there has been attention. Our first cases here in Orange County were in Westminster, a very large Vietnamese culture present there.

[00:05:01] And when we began to investigate illicit massage parlor businesses, we saw differences between a Vietnamese model massage parlor and a Korean model that might look more like a men’s coffee shop or something. Can you speak to what the deeper cultural systems may be that are operating behind the scenes?

[00:05:33] Youngbee Dale: It’s not just the Vietnamese, not just Korean. Especially in the illicit massage parlor, or commercial sex market in general, when you look at their money laundering method, the way they’re hiding money, they follow their own model. So traffickers can only be traffickers.

[00:05:48] They can only be themselves. So Chinese traffickers will never operate like Vietnamese or Korean or Hispanic traffickers, just like the Hispanic traffickers will never operate like Chinese, Vietnamese, or any other traffickers. So I think it has a lot to do with the traffickers’ business culture.

[00:06:13] So, case in point, in my study, primarily I found most cases, if it’s an illicit massage parlor, they are either Korean or Chinese. Some are Korean Chinese. Korean Chinese cases, some are different. There are particular individuals that are coming from Yanbian, China.

[00:06:38] They are Korean Chinese. They’re not Chinese, they’re Korean. They’re not South Korean, they’re Korean Chinese. So most of my studies, and the indictments that I collected, are really based on those populations. I found Vietnamese maybe one or two, not as much as Chinese or Korean.

[00:06:57] So that said, when I look through their payment method, for instance, in China, especially in rural China, most people do not use credit cards, and most people are not familiar. They don’t even know how to use a credit card, let alone Venmo, Zelle, PayPal. So they just use cash, whatever they do. It’s not just the illicit market.

[00:07:18] Their culture, their business culture, is using cash. They have to move a large amount of cash, then so be it. That’s what they’re going to do. There’s nothing else available. So that being said, when you look at an illicit massage parlor, a lot of Chinese massage parlors will say “Asian massage parlor” or “Korean massage parlor,” but they’re going to say, on payment method, “Cash only.”

[00:07:43] As opposed to when you look at a South Korean illicit massage parlor, it’ll say “Credit card or cash.” So it really goes back to the business culture and the business model, where the traffickers came from.

[00:08:01] Sandie Morgan: So how do you follow cash? I mean, credit card, I know how connected, and I’ve interviewed some financial analysts, accounting specialists. But tell me how you have identified cash money laundering.

[00:08:22] Youngbee Dale: Well, in the operations that I help friends with, or in the expert witness capacity, when you say “cash only,” generally they just collect the cash from the massage parlor, and either they’re going to move it through a taxi driver and then send it to the ultimate profiteer, and that ultimate profiteer, who is a real trafficker behind the scene, will deposit the cash into their business account or shell corporations.

[00:09:01] Sandie Morgan: So then you lose track of it, because it’s someplace else. It’s not near where the crime occurred.

[00:09:10] Youngbee Dale: Right. But at the same time, if your financial crime analyst knows how to tackle the Chinese or Korean business model, we call it KYC, know your customer. So among the financial institutions or financial crime analysts, to do their job, they need to understand who these people are.

[00:09:35] So if the financial institution understands the KYC model behind an illicit massage parlor, it’s not hard to trace down these illicit proceeds.

[00:09:46] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so I have a new acronym to add to my vocabulary, KYC. First, I thought you were advertising some new chicken sandwich. But okay, tell me about the KYC model. What are the elements, and how can we use it for investigating?

[00:10:08] Youngbee Dale: So the KYC model is essentially you’re just understanding who your customer is. So in other words, as I said, if we’re investigating Chinese organized crime, the financial institution has an obligation to understand the customer, the Chinese organized crime, as their customer. So that’ll be very different from the KYC model that involves domestic minor sex trafficking pimps.

[00:10:38] So if I can give you an example, a comparative analysis. For domestic minor sex trafficking pimps, their KYC, or transaction pattern, or spending, like the transactions on hotels and motels, or Walgreens, or Sephora for makeup, or an Uber trip, or a flight ticket, whatever.

[00:11:08] So those will fit into the domestic minor sex trafficking pimps’ transaction model, right? But when it comes to an illicit massage parlor of Chinese organized crime, you will see a lot of different shop operations. Such as, sometimes they’re tied to grocery stores, sometimes they’re tied to a real estate agency, sometimes they’re tied to a title agency, sometimes they’re tied to a nail salon or a Chinese buffet restaurant, right?

[00:11:48] So those are the key things that you’ll look for in Chinese organized crime running an illicit massage parlor, as opposed to what you look for in the domestic minor sex trafficking cases. You’ll look for frequent charges of Walgreens purchases. Lots of them, like $100, $500, or $1,000, something like that.

[00:12:09] Or makeup purchases at Sephora, or frequent transactions involving hotels and motels. So those are the two different KYC models involved in human trafficking.

[00:12:23] Sandie Morgan: So now I’m putting together these pieces, like there’s a puzzle you’ve laid out, and we’re looking at a victim-centered approach, so we tend to come into the scene, and everything in the investigation is around the victim, which is going to fit that domestic minor sex trafficking, or even commercial sexual exploitation of adult domestic victims, it sounds like.

[00:13:01] But culturally, if this is more of an Asian massage parlor, I should be asking different questions. So when you say “tied to,” how am I going to see how it is tied to something?

[00:13:20] Youngbee Dale: So, like Thai girls in a trafficking situation.

[00:13:25] Sandie Morgan: Yes. Yeah. So that you’re tied to a real estate front or something like that.

[00:13:33] Youngbee Dale: Yeah, so it goes back to the relational network model. In other words, if you understand financial crime, generally they look for the phone number ties, or ties to the shell corporation, or ties to the addresses, right? So, case in point, I had a case of a Chinese massage parlor that was actually a sexual assault case.

[00:13:59] And the customer was sexually assaulted by the manager, or one of the employees employed by the Chinese illicit massage parlor. And when I look at their organization chart, or the network model, there are lots of people that are involved. The defendants were tied to certain addresses, and that address, the property, was actually owned by the parents of the owner.

[00:14:29] So the owner, the real owner, is the parents. It’s not the son of the massage parlor, right? So from then on, I look at their record, business record, or property record, and then you will see multiple shell corporations. They have a history of closed corporations because they probably committed some kind of fraudulent activity.

[00:14:55] And his mom actually was at one point operating an illicit massage parlor in New York, until they moved to Texas. So that’s what I meant by “tied to.”

[00:15:07] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So now I’m thinking this is very layered. So here in Orange County, law enforcement shows up and it’s an Asian massage parlor. So what kind of financial indicators or business patterns should raise their concern that exploitation may be present?

[00:15:36] Youngbee Dale: So I will start with interview questions that focus on deduction. So for the women, and obviously this is a very universal case, the first thing you’re going to ask is, did you have to pay any amount of money to the owner for food?

[00:15:55] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:15:57] Youngbee Dale: For food, for water bottles, for towels, or what else, right?

[00:16:05] And the second thing you want to ask is, after paying that, how much do you charge, or what is the tip amount, and how much of the tip do you get to keep after paying such and such? So that’s one thing that I’m going to ask. The second thing you want to ask is about the hidden charges or fines, right?

[00:16:26] So hidden charges and fines are a very common method these traffickers use to control the victims, to get them in line. So when you ask a lot of victims, they’re not going to say their passport was confiscated, or that they were forced to live in the venue. That might have been the case in the ’90s, literally the ’90s, when these women were smuggled into the US.

[00:16:57] However, that is not the case now. The market has moved on. Whenever there’s some kind of regulation, whenever there is a different law enforcement tactic, that’s when the traffickers move on to the next tactic. And I think we’ve been advocating and training, including the US attorneys, to ask these questions.

[00:17:21] Passport confiscation, or “Are you forced to live in this vicinity?” or “Who brought you here?” Nobody brought them there. I mean, they pay the money to the taxi driver, and a lot of the time it’s word of mouth. A friend recruited her and then she entered the market. A friend might have been another woman in prostitution or a sex trafficking victim, right?

[00:17:46] Sandie Morgan: But so the key things that you want to ask about is the deduction from the water, food, or whatever. So wait a minute. So that sort of makes it look like the woman is in business and these are her business expenses.

[00:18:02] Youngbee Dale: A towel. So when I talked to a trafficker from South Korea, and he operated seven different brothels at one point, and then he fled the country and now he’s somewhere in China. So when I asked him about it, how do you do this? He said, “I’m not, and nobody in the illicit massage parlor industry is afraid of the vice unit.”

[00:18:28] The vice unit, right? Yeah, he said, of course that pressure happens, but that’s not your concern. Your biggest concern is labor, like the Department of Labor coming out and asking them, how much do you get paid, how much was the deduction, did you get paid minimum wage or a reasonable wage or whatever.

[00:18:55] That’s what you need to be concerned about. And I said, “Why?” And he said, “If the Department of Labor comes out and asks them about the wages, and the deductions or fines and whatever, then the woman is going to find out, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m being exploited. It’s not how it’s supposed to be.'”

[00:19:20] Right? “Then they get mad, and you don’t know what kind of information they’re going to spew out to the authorities,” right? So from the trafficker’s perspective, that’s more of a concern. So you need to make sure that the woman thinks she’s doing this on her own. So you tell her she keeps 70% and you only keep 30%.

[00:19:43] And I said to him, “Then how is that a good business?” That’s what I said. And he said, “Well, you make up the difference by charging them fines, or food, or a hidden fee, whatever. So somehow it works out.” That’s what he said.

[00:20:01] Sandie Morgan: Wow. That’s really flipping the script for sure. And I want to focus in on how, when we have new regulations, the traffickers immediately adjust their tactics, and we’re still training for earlier things that we’ve learned. And so in this frame, I think I’ve noticed that we don’t adjust our training very nimbly.

[00:20:37] We’re not quick. How can we do a better job of that?

[00:20:43] Youngbee Dale: I think I go back to what we talked about initially. We don’t have a lot of offender-focused data. We have a lot of victim-centered data, which is fine, because you need to be concerned about trauma-informed training, what these traumas look like, and how do I identify the victim, or how do we help them rebuild their lives.

[00:21:06] Those are important things. However, most of the time, I think we have a very low conviction rate of traffickers, especially if they’re from outside of the United States, because we don’t understand the trafficker’s tactics. So I think our training should focus on the trafficker’s tactics, which we do not have a lot of information on.

[00:21:32] Sandie Morgan: So we should be promoting offender research data collection. Okay. I’m teaching a research class this fall. I’m going to mention that. Let’s at least do a lit review to find out what’s out there. So you’ve lit my hair on fire for sure, Youngbee. I’m going to look at this. We have a wonderful criminal justice program here at Vanguard.

[00:21:59] We have a wonderful accounting and business program here, and I’ve talked to a couple of the professors about forensic accounting. I think someone who is thinking about how am I going to be part of the anti-trafficking movement, forensic accounting is like being a trafficking investigator on steroids.

[00:22:27] It’s just amazing. Okay. So tell me a little bit more about some of your expert witness research, and where visa fraud enters the area that you explore.

[00:22:48] Youngbee Dale: So, to be able to operate a successful human trafficking business, especially if you’re bringing victims from outside of the United States, there are things that you need to do. You need to understand how to successfully operate a human trafficking business. So one of them is money laundering, right?

[00:23:15] You need to learn how to make the money. The second thing is visa fraud. You need to learn how to commit visa fraud, immigration fraud, to bring the victim into the US. And then there are other elements that are involved in how to operate the illicit business successfully.

[00:23:35] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So when I’m thinking about next steps here for a stronger response, can you identify three things that our local federal task forces that partner with city police departments, county sheriffs, and labor trafficking officials, what are three things we could immediately begin to ask to improve our identification and our conviction rate?

[00:24:14] Youngbee Dale: So I think changing the training content from what used to be relevant 20, 30 years ago. I think we need to change the content and we need to stop saying, “Did they take away your passport?” Or, “Were you allowed to leave the site?” Of course I’m allowed to leave.

[00:24:38] Do I want to leave? No, for so many reasons. I don’t have to leave, right? Or, “Were you forced to live in the venue?” So I think we need to stop training based on the old model. We need to make our training up to date with what’s relevant today, 2026, such as deduction, food, and if there’s any debt bondage, which is really hard to extract because nobody wants to talk about being in debt, since it’s sort of a shame factor.

[00:25:10] And I think there is little understanding of forced fraud and coercion in terms of East Asian cultures. In fact, if I want to show it to you, there are three books that just came out in South Korea since 2019. These are all survivors’ stories, and the research is on debt bondage and forced fraud and coercion that play into the East Asian culture.

[00:25:41] And they’re very different in how it plays out, in terms of forced fraud and coercion. I think we need to have more of this data to be able to successfully bring convictions. And I think the third thing is, financial crime is very relevant and we need forensic accountants, we need everything.

[00:26:05] However, when I talk to, and I get many calls, I get many calls from passionate local law enforcement around the nation. They want to solve this problem. They want to do something about it, and they don’t have money. So this young, passionate local law enforcement officer comes to me and says, “Hey, I want to do this, I want to do that,” and I say, “Well, do you have a forensic accountant?

[00:26:30] How many people do you have in your unit? Is your prosecutor on board? If it’s multi-jurisdiction, which most likely it is, then are you well connected to the US attorney? Is he or she on board with you?” And if these are not on board, and you don’t have any resources for training, or how to seize assets, and you don’t have money resources to do all this investigation, then they’re not going in there.

[00:27:02] So I think that’s my biggest concern. We don’t have a lot of money when it comes to training law enforcement, or supporting law enforcement to fight back against traffickers.

[00:27:12] Sandie Morgan: So collaboration. Everybody that listens to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast knows I am always promoting collaboration. So all those people you just mentioned, the prosecutor, the AUSA, the local, and the forensic accounting, those are all important partners. We cannot expect a local law enforcement officer to be able to nail down a very complicated trafficking case, so we have to build those collaborative models.

[00:27:49] And then, those books you showed, it’s like I couldn’t read the covers. So how am I going to do a lit review when it’s in Korean?

[00:28:00] Youngbee Dale: I don’t know. So that’s my other concern. The whole reason, you liked one of my posts on LinkedIn, the whole reason I started the East Asian Crime newsletter on LinkedIn is because there’s a lot of a gap, and I noticed this since 2009 when I started my work in the US. Previously I was working in a nonprofit in South Korea.

[00:28:22] And when I started my work in the US, there was a huge gap between what these newspapers were saying, what these major organizations at the time were saying about how this works, versus what’s actually going on and what they’re saying in the Korean newspaper. So I noticed the gap between the Korean newspaper, what they’re saying based on the actual interviews with the survivors, versus what the anti-trafficking movement has been telling everyone about how this actually works.

[00:28:57] Sandie Morgan: Oh, wow. Youngbee, I am so excited about learning about this. So how do people sign on to your newsletter, and how do they reach out to you if they want to learn more?

[00:29:10] Youngbee Dale: They can just email me, dale@dale-consulting.com, or I have a website, Dale Consulting. And if you just Google my name, I have LinkedIn, and I also have a YouTube channel if they want to learn more about the issue.

[00:29:27] Sandie Morgan: And the newsletter, is that like monthly?

[00:29:31] Youngbee Dale: So I collect the news on financial crime in East Asia. Right now there’s a lot of news that South Koreans, and other people, are focused on, a scam, like labor trafficking connected to a Chinese scam organization. So mostly I cover how they’re laundering money, because the way they launder money, just like anything else, when I see a lot of the tactics that have been used in the US, they’re not different from what I’ve seen in South Korea.

[00:30:02] So I’m hoping, and asking God, that this will be a useful tool for the investigators and prosecutors, or people in the movement, to trace down their money laundering method.

[00:30:15] Sandie Morgan: Well, Youngbee Dale, I am so glad we had this conversation, because I feel like you don’t have a cape, but you are a superhero as you raise awareness of the different financial criminal avenues and how we can use that to combat human trafficking. Thank you so much for being on the show.

[00:30:40] Youngbee Dale: Thank you for having me.

[00:30:43] Elisha: Thank you to Youngbee Dale for showing us how following the money can uncover trafficking networks that may not be visible through traditional victim identification. Listeners, if you love this conversation, make sure you check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:30:59] If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And as always, thank you for listening.