Jeff Keith Email and Phone Number

Mission: Guardian Group’s mission is to prevent and disrupt the sex trafficking of women and children in the United States.Background: Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Bend Oregon but with nationwide reach and impact, Guardian Group focuses on significant hubs of trafficking across the United States and partners with law enforcement to counter sex trafficking of women and minors. Between 2018 and 2023 Guardian Group identified 747 potential victims of sex trafficking across 31 states, enabling resource constrained law enforcement to conduct numerous operations, recover victims and prosecute those responsible for this exploitation. We do not charge a fee to any law enforcement due to their constrained budgets.Approach: Guardian Group’s team utilizes the skills and expertise of military veteran intelligence analysts to identify women and minors online who are victims of sex trafficking. Our support assists local, state, and federal law enforcement in recovering these victims and is 100% free of charge. We provide any additional research they need during their investigation of the traffickers. In 2022, Guardian Group launched a new, first-ever program utilizing globally crowdsourced skilledvolunteers to scale our victim identification for US law enforcement, all the while corroborating each lead through Guardian Group standards. This new program called Project 1591® [www.project1591.us] is the way we will scale our impact to really confront the growing crime of sex trafficking, without dramatically increasing our costs. Through this program growth, we will see a demonstrated increase in participating LE actions to conduct operations to recover victims and prosecute traffickers. Once a fully staffed program of internal analysts coupled with our planned 500 actively engaged volunteers has been met, we project our victim identification to law enforcement will be approximately 8500 annually.