Full transcript
From Pararescueman to CIA to DeliverFund
Nic McKinley opened the interview by explaining that he began his career in military special operations in the United States Air Force as a pararescueman. After leaving that role, he spent a couple of years doing private personnel recovery work primarily for financial institutions, which in practice meant retrieving wealthy investment bankers who had gotten into trouble overseas, usually involving alcohol and women, before news of the incident could hurt their employer's stock price ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
From there he received a call inviting him to join a program at the Central Intelligence Agency, which he described as leading to a phenomenal career. He said that throughout his CIA work, most of which was focused on counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism, he kept encountering the human trafficking problem overseas and eventually in the United States, and realized there was no one in government whose sole job was to take that intelligence and act on it. That gap, he said, is what drove him to found DeliverFund, which he describes as a non-profit private intelligence company that helps law enforcement hunt down human traffickers so they can be put in jail ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)). McKinley credited abolitionist William Wilberforce as an inspiration, quoting his line to Parliament that once you know about a horror like this, you can never look away and can never again say you did not know.
The bomb-maker case that first exposed him to trafficking
McKinley referenced a specific case from his CIA years involving a bomb maker who was also trafficking children, which the host raised early in the conversation as one of the harrowing stories that first pulled McKinley into this fight. McKinley said he was not authorized to share full details, but explained that the bombs in question were triggered by pressure plates, and the children involved were not being deliberately tricked into stepping on the devices, rather they had no idea what was happening. He said the bomb maker's calculation was that the pressure created by a child's footstep would not set off the bomb, but the pressure from an adult would ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
He used this case to illustrate a broader point: across special operations and intelligence communities, missions with human trafficking as the sole objective are extremely rare. McKinley said that when he asked friends among former spies and top-tier military operators on both sides of the Atlantic whether they had ever been sent on a mission whose sole purpose was to confront a human trafficker, he could not find a single one who said yes. He argued that if the resources devoted to the counter-narcotics fight were redirected to human trafficking and child exploitation, those problems would essentially be solved.
How trafficking works: grooming, control, and heroin as a business tool
McKinley explained that in the western world, human trafficking overwhelmingly takes the form of commercial sex trafficking rather than forced labor, and that on the surface it can look identical to prostitution even though the two are legally and morally distinct: people who are prostituted are not doing so through fraud, force, or coercion, while trafficking victims are compelled into the situation. He said most trafficking recruitment today happens online rather than through physical grooming, since traffickers can find vulnerable targets through smartphones and social media, and the transactions themselves increasingly occur behind closed doors rather than on visible street corners or the track ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
He described how traffickers manipulate victims over months or sometimes years before bringing them into what traffickers call their stable, physically, sexually, and emotionally abusing them to break their spirit. He said traffickers deliberately addict victims to heroin, rather than cheaper substances like alcohol or marijuana, as a calculated business decision, because a dependent victim can be controlled by withholding the drug, and victims described withdrawal as feeling like their bones were breaking from inside their bodies. McKinley also described a chilling tactic called a hot shot, where a trafficker overdoses a victim who has become too difficult to control, so that police who find the body treat it as a routine, closed case opioid overdose rather than investigating a homicide. He noted that the youngest trafficking victim DeliverFund had personally encountered was four years old, and that partners at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had seen victims even younger.
Vulnerability, the pandemic, and how traffickers pose as boyfriends
McKinley said that any vulnerable person can be targeted by traffickers, but risk compounds with factors like lower socioeconomic status and the absence of a positive male role model, which is why traffickers often initially pose as boyfriends to girls in the 12 to 14 age range, offering to solve their problems. He pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study in compounding vulnerability, noting that when schools closed, many children lost the only structure they had, were handed laptops with unrestricted internet access, and became more exposed to online predators as a result ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
He debunked circulating internet conspiracy theories, such as the idea that traffickers mark cars with water bottles or that a specific furniture company was trafficking children through its products, calling these claims false. He explained that traffickers, like any efficient business, target the highest probability opportunities: in the United States, that means loitering near bus stops looking for apparent runaways, or outside community colleges and fast food restaurants. He cited advisor Timea Nagy, a survivor and author who grew up in Bucharest, Romania, and was trafficked into Toronto, Canada under the pretense of a nanny job before her passport was taken and she was forced into a strip club and held through debt bondage, as an example of how the same patterns recur across Eastern Europe, Moldova, Croatia, South America, Central America, and India. He noted that the average survival period for a trafficking victim is about seven years before death, and that some victims eventually cooperate with their trafficker to receive better treatment, becoming a bottom girl and sometimes transitioning into becoming traffickers themselves.
Taking down Backpage.com and moving into its old headquarters
Asked about concrete victories, McKinley discussed the shutdown of Backpage.com, which he described as one of the most prolific online advertisers of trafficking victims globally. DeliverFund was one of several groups, mostly law enforcement, that provided intelligence to help authorities uncover how Backpage's operators were laundering money. He said Backpage's website now displays a notice that it was seized by the Department of Justice, and that DeliverFund, learning that Backpage's former headquarters would be vacated, moved its own International Human Trafficking Analysis Center into that same building ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
McKinley said Backpage executives pled guilty to charges including human trafficking, and that the company had used automated software to alter the listed ages of minors being advertised for sex, changing them to 18 so ads could bypass moderation instead of being flagged for law enforcement. He drew a firm line between DeliverFund's mission and the broader debate over legalized prostitution, stating that data shows legalizing prostitution increases human trafficking in every country that has tried it, citing Germany as the most recent example, whereas the Nordic model of decriminalizing the selling of sex while criminalizing buying is associated with lower trafficking numbers. He also referenced a case where a law enforcement officer pulled a trafficking victim out of the trunk of a car, and said that five years later she was doing well and now works for DeliverFund as a consultant.
Sentencing, prosecution challenges, and one brutal case
McKinley said he believes any sentence less than life imprisonment is too lenient for human trafficking, noting that the federal minimum mandatory sentence in the United States is 15 years, while states including Montana and Texas allow life sentences at the state level. He cited the harshest sentence from a case DeliverFund worked on as three consecutive life sentences, describing a trafficker who murdered one victim in a park in front of other victims as a warning, kept victims in dog crates, force-fed them narcotics, and recruited young girls working summer jobs at fast food restaurants ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
He explained a recurring prosecutorial complication: victims who are coerced into recruiting or managing other victims can end up being arrested as co-conspirators rather than recognized as victims themselves, complicating both prosecution and justice. DeliverFund addresses this through law enforcement training that teaches officers to recognize signs of trafficking so they can approach a suspect as a victim rather than charge her with prostitution, using DeliverFund's intelligence to inform the conversation so officers can tell a suspected victim that they already know who her trafficker is. He also noted the importance of the U.S. T-visa for trafficking victims who are smuggled across borders and become vulnerable to exploitation once they exist outside a country's legal system, and that DeliverFund has also seen traffickers convicted on other charges, like money laundering, in jurisdictions where local prosecution lacked the resources or will to bring trafficking charges directly, since prosecutors often prefer money laundering cases because the evidence is more straightforwardly documentary.
Major sporting events as trafficking demand spikes
McKinley explained that any large gathering of people for sport or leisure creates a market opportunity for traffickers. He said DeliverFund had recently been at WrestleMania and cited the Super Bowl as a recurring example: when the Super Bowl was held in Tampa, Florida, local traffickers called trafficker contacts around the country asking them to bring more victims because local supply could not meet demand. He listed other events with the same dynamic, including SHOT Show, the Consumer Electronics Show, adult entertainment industry conventions, the NBA Final Four, and the World Cup, summarizing the pattern as trafficking following wherever money and crowds concentrate ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
On broader scope, McKinley said the type of trafficking that dominates depends on region and economics: commercial sex trafficking is concentrated in the western world, while forced labor trafficking is concentrated in second and third world countries, and that trafficking generally follows wherever money flows, for instance rising with oil prices in oil-rich countries. He also confirmed that DeliverFund had encountered cases of organ trafficking, describing it as equally horrific, and said that despite governments being able to precisely quantify narcotics and illegal weapons markets, no equivalent robust data exists for human trafficking markets globally, which he identified as a research gap that universities and society need to address.
Advice for victims, law enforcement, and the public
When asked what he would tell a trafficked person watching the video, McKinley said he would be surprised if a victim had the freedom to watch it, but that if they did, he would urge them that law enforcement is their friend and really their only way out, and to tell any officer who doubts them to contact DeliverFund, which can supply the intelligence needed to prove the case. He added that it is significantly better for an officer's career to arrest a trafficker than to mistakenly arrest a trafficking victim ([Shaun Attwood's True Crime Podcast, YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ke2xp1CIo)).
McKinley pointed listeners to deliverfund.org for parent resources and highlighted a video series by senior targeting analyst Kara Smith, nicknamed Kara the Huntress, who has an Air Force, National Security Agency, and Department of Justice background and who infiltrates traffickers' social media platforms to produce short explainer videos. On the question of why there is no coordinated global focus on child sex trafficking, McKinley said it is a complicated problem shaped by cultural practices in some countries, poverty, and violence, and reiterated that there is insufficient academic and governmental research into trafficking markets compared to narcotics or weapons markets. He closed by saying the best way people can help is to financially partner with DeliverFund, since the organization's analysts work full-time and its technology is state of the art but expensive, while its services to law enforcement and victims remain free.