An information war about the Russia-Ukraine conflict is continuing online even as troops clash on the ground, with bots spreading disinformation and Russian state media seeking to divide Western viewers.
A viral Facebook post from April 2 claims Ukraine is the money laundering and child sex trafficking "capital of the world." The post accumulated more than 1,000 interactions in less than a week.
But experts don't rank Ukraine as the worst in either human trafficking or money laundering.
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USA TODAY reached out to the user who posted the claim for comment.
Though several organizations track data about human trafficking, there is no exact country-by-country index for child sex trafficking in particular, according to Kristen Leanderson Abrams, senior director of combatting human trafficking at the McCain Institute.
A 2015 report by the International Labour Organization stated that in 2002, an estimated 6 million children were enslaved worldwide, with 1.2 million trafficked and 1.8 million sexually exploited. In 2016, an estimated 40.3 million people were victims of modern slavery, with women and girls accounting for an estimated 99% of the victims of illegal sexual exploitation.
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