The recent attention being drawn to the recruitment of African youth to fight on the frontlines in Russia and Ukraine has eclipsed the numerous deceitful recruitment schemes entrapping young West Africans into modern-day slavery.
As of July 16, 2026, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) supported 1,513 victims of trafficking in West and Central Africa, including 491 men and 1,022 women.
While young men are lured with promises of football contracts with top foreign teams, scholarships and job placements abroad, women are usually lured through caregiving responsibilities, gendered trust networks, intimate relationships or promises of safe overseas work.
In 2025, the African Defence Forum reported that 33 people from Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo were tricked into paying as much as $9,000 each to fake recruiters in a human trafficking operation that investigators described as a pyramid scheme.
Victims were held in abusive conditions in Abidjan, where their traffickers forced them to post pictures of themselves on social media accounts in luxury hotels and similar glamorous settings to lure others into the trap.
Traffickers sold the lie by giving their victims Canadian contact information and restricting what they could say to friends and family, according to the report.
The alarming nature of human rights violations endured by victims chasing the mirage of endless opportunities calls for an urgent intervention to prevent the vulnerabilities luring West African youth to the growing deceitful recruitment schemes.
Deceptive recruitment tactics
Deceptive recruitment schemes have evolved beyond the old archetype of physical abduction.
The accumulation of fraud, coercion and social engineering ensures that victims have little or no way of uncovering deceit and escaping the structural coercion.
Fraudulent recruitment methods create false hope to exploit the desires of desperate young people. Promises are made to create an illusion of opportunity and digital platforms, particularly social media, facilitate the recruitment of many young people.
Networks such as Telegram and WhatsApp groups are created, where members and victims of the recruitment schemes are made to promote the credibility and impact of the scheme to lure other victims.
Websites are created to advertise fake opportunities, and these websites sometimes clone authentic portals of private and government institutions to lend credence to their activities, making them harder to expose as fraudulent.
Human rights implications
Once recruited and upon arrival at the destination, a series of human rights violations are initiated.
The confiscation of travel documents and electronic devices, confinement to particular locations, and prohibition or restriction of communication with friends, family and the outside world constitute a grave violation of the victim’s human rights.
Confinement to particular locations without a lawful basis or due process amounts to arbitrary arrest and detention, violating Article 9 of the universal declaration of human rights (UDHR) and international convention on civil and political rights (ICCPR), which state that "everyone has the right to liberty and security of person and no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention."
Confiscating travel documents prevents victims from moving freely, both within a country and across borders, once they realise the deceitful or fraudulent nature of their recruitment.
This freedom of movement is guaranteed by Article 12 of the ICCPR, which states that "everyone lawfully within a territory has the right to liberty of movement, freedom to choose their residence and the freedom to leave any country."
Confiscating mobile phones and other electronic devices prevents victims from seeking and receiving information, ideas or help from others, hence infringing upon their freedom of communication or expression.
Article 19 of the UDHR and ICCPR protects the right to freedom of expression, which explicitly includes the freedom to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
These violations constitute labour exploitation and human trafficking, where victims are subjected to modern slavery, which is prohibited by Article 8 of the UDHR and ICCPR.
Forced criminals
Despite the evident violations of victims’ human rights, deceptive recruitment schemes present some legal challenges that complicate the rescue of victims and the holding of perpetrators accountable.
Victims are entangled in forced criminality where traffickers force victims to commit a wide range of fraudulent activities such as cryptocurrency scams, fake gambling operations, romance scams and online extortion.
Jurisdictional hurdles in proving the legal threshold for deceit are, therefore, difficult due to sophisticated psychological manipulation, digital fragmentation and cross-border operational loopholes that obscure the initial point of fraud from the site of exploitation.
Urgent strategic interventions
The root cause of youth vulnerability to deceptive recruitment schemes is overwhelming unemployment.
There is, therefore, a need to scale up responses to youth unemployment and underemployment issues.
Educational systems must be transformed to align with labour market realities and reduce graduate unemployment.
Conclusion
Deceptive recruitment networks are transnational, coordinated, and highly adaptive, operating across West Africa and beyond.
Combating these networks requires a holistic, multi-stakeholder, human-centred effort embedded in victim protection, dismantling traditional and digital syndicates, and, above all, creating robust local opportunities to ensure the safety, dignity, and future of West African youth.
The writer is a Senior Lecturer, Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre.
