Detecting Deceptive Recruitment: A Signal-theoretic Machine Learning Framework for Early Identification of Labour Exploitation
Researchers build a multimodal ML framework detecting deceptive job advertisements used for labour exploitation, achieving ROC-AUC 0.87–0.97 across individual modalities.
Using 464 verified cases (164 deceptive, 300 legitimate) gathered through anti-slavery charities across nine origin countries and 21 industries, researchers combined computer vision, NLP, and semantic embeddings to flag exploitative recruitment ads. SHAP analysis identified text quality, readability indices, risk keyword density, and visa sponsorship mentions as top discriminators, with combined modalities reaching ROC-AUC up to 0.97. Findings are operationalized in a proof-of-concept decision support system providing interpretable risk scores for practitioners.