At 20, the young woman was struggling. She’d just given birth and had tuition, rent and baby formula to pay for. A single mother in Phoenix, she was trying to make ends meet and build a future, studying for her psychology degree.

       “It kind of gets (to be) so much that you can’t ask somebody for help,” she told CNN.

       Then one night, a Snapchat post seemed to offer a way out: “5-10k in a day lmk.”

       Desperate, she swiped up.

       “I said, ‘What is this for? What you guys doing?’ And they had explained to me, ‘You’re going to be picking up people.’ And I’m like, ‘People? Do they need a ride? What’s going on?’”

       She stopped short of pressing for details. She didn’t have a car or even a license, so she was convinced she couldn’t do the job anyway. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the money. A week later she had another idea: Her friend had a car and could drive. Could they split the money?

       “Yeah, we’ll still pay,” came the reply.

       She didn’t stop to think much about the dangers or whether the offer was too good to be true — or legal.

       Her friend headed south, collected a group of migrants near the border, and drove back again. Later that night, a man handed the young woman a wad of cash.

       She was now involved in migrant smuggling, enlisted by a Mexican cartel recruiter through social media. An American operating entirely inside the United States, she was nevertheless extending the reach of cross-border gangs making money from trading people and drugs.

       CNN has spent six months investigating how the cartels recruit, how people get sucked in and how law enforcement is tackling the problem which can, at first glance, look as innocent as a young, licensed person taking a drive through the desert.

       The easy money kept coming for the young woman, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals but spoke with CNN by phone.

       She said she did not know the man who brought her the money that first time, or all the times that followed.

       “It would always be random people … that would bring me the money to get paid,” she said. “And from that point forward, it was just me finding people that would go and … drive, and we would split the money.”

       For months, she reposted the same message on her own Snapchat story: “5-10k in a day lmk.” She helped to recruit scores of drivers who smuggled nearly 100 people north from the US-Mexico border, according to court documents.

       The risks became clear only when one of those drivers was stopped, she said.

       “That one guy I had on Snapchat messaged me like, ‘Hey, this person got pulled over, they got arrested, they’re getting questioned, make sure you have everything off of your phone.’ And I was like, whoa … what’s happening. That’s when I realized, OK, this is what’s going on,” she said.

       But she didn’t stop.

       “I feel like I fell too deep into what was going on … the money that was being made … I was, at the time, being selfish. … I really didn’t care.”

       It took federal investigators at least four months to flag her account, and she was arrested soon after. She pleaded guilty to charges connected to being a social media recruiter and was sentenced to prison.

       Even after her release, she said, she never knew who was on the other end of the account.

       “To my knowledge it was one person that I would communicate with. But now … it could have been multiple people on one account … I truly have no clue who I was working for.”

       Experts believe the anonymous account was most likely run by an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel, which dominates smuggling routes through Arizona. Most of these anonymous accounts, authorities say, trace back to cartel-linked recruiters.

       Tech companies sporadically work with local police to track and deplatform harmful accounts, law enforcement sources say. The Drug Enforcement Agency, which specifically monitors narcotics smuggling nationwide, “works closely with numerous social media companies to strengthen their ability to combat drug trafficking on their platforms,” a spokesperson said. Without identifying specific platforms, the representative said that “while some companies have been highly receptive, others have been less engaged.”

       CNN reached out to several platforms that host smuggler recruitment material for comment.

       A TikTok spokesperson told CNN its teams use automated moderation technology to counter some of this material, which identifies harmful posts before they reach users’ feeds; between January and March, the platform says it “proactively removed 95.6% of content which breached (TikTok’s) policies on the trade or marketing of regulated goods.”

       The spokesperson also referenced an excerpt from the platform’s community guidelines: “We respect human dignity and are committed to protecting people from exploitation. That’s why we don’t allow content that promotes or facilitates human trafficking or smuggling.”

       For its part, Snapchat said it similarly employs proactive detection designed to target the hiring of smugglers across the southern border of the US. The platform told CNN it has been able to detect and remove thousands of pieces of such content and noted that it blocks search results associated with smuggler recruitment.

       Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Its community policies instruct users not to post content that “offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling” or “asks for human smuggling services.”

       The offers of cash for criminal work can pop into anyone’s feed. CNN’s six-month investigation uncovered hundreds of recruitment posts on Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat—some in Spanish but many in English.

       Those recruited are usually young adults between 18 and 25, according to more than two dozen attorneys who represent accused smugglers and were interviewed for this story.

       Among them, there’s no distinct profile. Accused smugglers may be addicts, wannabe cartel foot soldiers, or straitlaced high schoolers, the lawyers said. Vicki Brambl, an assistant federal public defender in Tucson, Arizona, says certain risk factors—like a prior criminal history, drug use or growing up in a low-income household—can increase the likelihood someone will get involved with smuggling. But in one case, the son of a local cop was involved.

       “Anyone can be a target,” says Brambl, who’s supervised dozens of smuggling cases. Many recruited to these networks, like the young woman in Phoenix, are desperate and see stacks of cash advertised on social media as either a way out or a risk worth taking; Brambl added many don’t have the maturity or judgment to realize the dangers.

       The hundreds of social media posts advertising smuggling jobs analyzed by CNN show patterns and some veiled terminology.

       The word “smuggler” almost never appears; recruiters opt for terms like “drivers” or “choferes” or simply “taxis.” A taxi or car emoji can also put out a call for drivers, sometimes with chicken emojis to indicate “pollos,” Spanish slang used to refer to migrants.

       Emojis and coded language enable cartel-linked recruitment accounts to circumvent content moderation restrictions on mainstream social platforms, which have seen scattered attempts to clamp down on narco-related content. TikTok banned the hashtag #carteltok earlier this year, though it is almost never used by members of these stateside criminal networks.

       But the cartels do want the posts to be elevated into people’s feeds, so many use hashtags, like #fyp (for you page) and #viral, in addition to tagged locations in population hubs along the US-Mexico border.

       After establishing communication on mainstream social platforms, the recruiter often moves the conversation to Meta’s WhatsApp, with its end-to-end encryption and ability to track others in real time.

       Next, the smuggler travels hours or even days to coordinates sent by their anonymous recruiter — some from as far as New York or Seattle, law enforcement officers and recruiters in Arizona and Texas said.

       Coordinators can use real-time location tracking to monitor their drivers en route — and post screenshots to encourage prospective recruits.

       At the pickup location, often down a remote dirt road, lawyers said, a group of migrants jumps into the car. What happens next is up to chance: Some drivers make it to drop-off locations in Phoenix or Tucson, dodging license plate readers and checkpoints on desert highways saturated with police.

       It’s possible to circumvent law enforcement — one active cartel recruiter boasted about having ‘bought off’ three checkpoints and federal agencies haveadmitted several of their officers helped facilitate smuggling in recent years.

       Other drivers are arrested — collateral damage in a massive criminal enterprise they can only begin to grasp.

       Now, the incentive for young Americans to get involved is on the rise: With illegal border crossings falling amid the Trump administration’s crackdown, the price to cross has increased dramatically, and bigger payouts are available for drivers, according to the active recruiter and a former federal law enforcement official.

       In a Phoenix parking lot, a man grumbled that the Trump administration has made his job more difficult.

       The senior Sinaloa Cartel operative, whom CNN interviewed to better understand the inner workings of these cross-border networks, is responsible for directing the flow of migrants and drugs in southern Arizona.

       Several of his associates have been jailed since Trump took office.

       Earlier this month, the Drug Enforcement Agency announced 617 arrests and over $12 million in currency and asset seizures during a concentrated effort to dismantle Sinaloa Cartel operations in the US and abroad.

       The man, whose position CNN confirmed independently, said he could be arrested too, but that would not stop the business.

       “People are still going to bring things” into the US, he said, adding he thought the administration’s focus was misguided. “(Trump) wants to fight with the Mexicans, with others … but the problem is here.”

       He said the drivers recruited through social media should know the risks. “When you want to work … yes, you understand.”

       But it seems even he wishes he had never gotten involved.

       Years ago, he said, he began working for the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, smuggling marijuana to feed his family. Now, he might make a different choice. “No vale la pena,” he says: Cartel work isn’t worth the risk.

       Nearing 9 p.m. in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, a team of counter-smuggling detectives was wrapping up for the night.

       In the final days of an 18-month investigation, the officers spent the afternoon surveilling suspects they believed were involved in managing one corridor where migrants and drugs pass into the US.

       Then, one of the Cochise County Sheriff’s deputies spots a suspect’s gray sedan parked outside a nearby ATM.

       The officer swung his undercover truck around, radioing his team to converge on a man who was depositing a $50 bill into the machine. “All right, I’ll pull behind him and pin him in.”

       They closed in. “Police, don’t move!” one of the officers yelled, drawing his rifle.

       They detained the man, a 21-year-old out with his girlfriend and their toddler, and then searched his Chevrolet Malibu.

       They found a baptism gown wrapped in plastic hanging in the back seat and an iPhone in a bedazzled case, which the couple shared. Police said its screen still showed a WhatsApp conversation about a group of “pollos” who had just crossed the border nearby.

       Another conversation from just a few days before mentioned a failed attempt to pick up a group of migrants. “We dipped because that pollo stopped answering and there was border patrol,” one of the man’s associates told him, according to law enforcement.

       The officers told CNN the young man helped run a criminal syndicate that transported migrants and drugs across the border. A detective walked him across the parking lot to say goodbye to his family, then guided him into a waiting squad car.

       The iPhone was bagged as evidence to be brought back to the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office and searched for signs of his involvement with cross-border smuggling, like recruitment ads posted to social media.

       Away from targeted operations, the counter-smuggling team patrols Cochise County’s 83-mile stretch of the border. The desert sprawls into the Mexican state of Sonora and on distant peaks, the sheriff’s deputies say, cartel scouts sit with binoculars watching their every move.

       To evade law enforcement, smugglers have used repurposed school buses, fake border patrol trucks and other means to move their product, and only close inspections can distinguish these from the real thing.

       So, the patrols flag down suspicious vehicles and check them, one by one, harnessing a sophisticated network of license plate readers and other high-tech monitoring tools to suggest who might be out of place, like a college student, far from home, hoping for a quick payday after clicking on a post in a social media feed.

       Federal prosecutors levied smuggling charges against 431 people over the past six months in Arizona alone, Department of Justice data shows.

       Earlier this year, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and several other legislators introduced a bipartisan bill calling for a crackdown on cartels using social media to recruit. It has made no progress in the Senate or the House of Representatives.

       The recruitment posts, however, continue.