CHISINAU, MOLDOVA - Laura was barely 18 when a palm reader told her she could make $180 a month working in beetroot farms in Russia — an attractive sum for a girl struggling to make a living in the town of Drochia, in Moldova's impoverished north.
That she had no passport, the fortune teller said, was not a problem. Her future employers would help her cross the border.
"They gave me a [fake] birth certificate stating I was 14," Laura, who declined to give her real name, told Reuters in an interview.
That was enough to get her through border controls as she traveled by bus with a smuggler posing as one of her parents.
It was the beginning of a long tale of exploitation for Laura — one of many such stories in Moldova in eastern Europe, which aims to become the first country in the world to pilot blockchain to tackle decades of widespread human trafficking.
Trafficking generates illegal profits of $150 billion a year globally, with about 40 million people estimated to be trapped as modern-day slaves — mostly women and girls — in forced labor and forced marriages, according to leading anti-slavery groups.
The digital tool behind the cryptocurrency bitcoin is increasingly being tested for social causes, from Coca-Cola creating a workers' registry to fight forced labor to tracking supply chains, such as cobalt which is often mined by children.
Moldova has one of the highest rates of human trafficking in Europe as widespread poverty and unemployment drive many young people, mostly women, to look for work overseas, according to the United Nations migration agency (IOM).
Due to the hidden nature of trafficking and the stigma attached, it is unknown how many people in the former Soviet country have been trafficked abroad but IOM has helped some 3,400 victims — 10 percent of whom were children — since 2001.
In Russia, Laura was forced to toil long hours, beaten and never paid. After ending up in hospital, she was rescued by a doctor, only to be trafficked again a few years later when an abusive partner sold her into prostitution.
She now lives with her daughter in a rehabilitation center in the northern village of Palaria with help from the charity CCF Moldova.
"I had a lot of suffering," the 36-year-old said. "I am very afraid of being sold again, afraid about my child."
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Moldova plans to launch a pilot of its digital identity project this year, working with the Brooklyn-based software company ConsenSys, which won a U.N. competition in March to design an identity system to combat child trafficking.
Undocumented children are easy prey for traffickers using fake documents to transport them across borders to work in brothels or to sell their organs, experts say.
More than 40,000 Moldovan children have been left behind by parents who have migrated abroad for work, often with little supervision, according to IOM.
"A lot of children are staying just with their grandfathers or grandmas, spending [more] time in the streets," said Lilian Levandovschi, head of Moldova's anti-trafficking police unit.
Moldova, with a population of 3.5 million, is among the poorest countries in Europe with an average monthly disposable income of 2,250 Moldovan Leu ($135), government data shows.
ConsenSys aims to create a secure, digital identity on a blockchain — or decentralized digital ledger shared by a network of computers — for Moldovan children, linking their personal identities with other family members.
Moldova has strengthened its anti-trafficking laws since Laura's ordeal and children now need to carry a passport and be accompanied by a parent, or an adult carrying a letter of permission signed by a guardian, to exit the country.
With the blockchain system, children attempting to cross the border would be asked to scan their eyes or fingerprints.
A phone alert would notify their legal guardians, requiring at least two to approve the crossing, said Robert Greenfield who is managing the ConsenSys project.
Any attempt to take a child abroad without their guardians' permission would be permanently recorded on the database, which would detect patterns of behavior to help catch traffickers and could be used as evidence in court.
"Nobody can bribe someone to delete that information," said Mariana Dahan, co-founder of World Identity Network (WIN), an initiative promoting digital identities and a partner in the blockchain competition.
Corruption and official complicity in trafficking are significant problems in Moldova, according to the U.S. State Department, which last year downgraded it to Tier 2 in a watchlist of those not doing enough to fight modern day slavery.