Timea Nagy was nineteen when she answered a newspaper ad in Budapest calling for young women to work as housekeepers and babysitters in Canada. Interviewed and hired but what seemed like a bonafide recruitment agency, she left her home on the promise she would earn good money to send home to her family, having no idea that she’d been lured by a ring of international human traffickers. Upon her arrival in Toronto, Timea was forced into sex labour in some of the city’s seediest nightclubs and kept by her “agents” for three months until she escaped.

Ten years after her escape, Timea began working with the police and government to bring human trafficking to an end, educating thousands of officers, changing legislation, and opening Canada’s first safe house for victims of forced sex work. She founded Walk With Me Canada, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending human trafficking, and has helped over 300 victims escape their captors. She has provided testimony in 500 police investigations and her key witness testimony in Project OPAPA—Canada’s biggest human trafficking investigation—helped convict a dozen kingpin ringleaders and bring them to justice. She went on to work with the RCMP, the FBI and currently touring America with Canadian based company called Verafin. Via Verafin she is reaching North American financial institutions on anti-money laundering projects, attacking the 6 billion dollar/year industry of illegal sex work.