They wear football jerseys, T-shirts, jeans and sneakers. They look like ordinary customers having a beer at the corner pub but that ability to blend in is also key to their role in the fight against human trafficking.
They are the men and women of an elite human trafficking unit in Spain's Catalonia region and they have to get key players in criminal gangs to trust them.
The region is a hot spot for traffickers. Barcelona - its biggest city and one of Europe's marquee tourist destinations - provides a cloak for traffickers who bring victims in on tourist visas.
Large-scale criminal organizations from Eastern Europe, Africa and China are setting up shop - bringing people into Spain under the guise of giving them jobs, then keeping their passports and forcing them to work in nightmarish conditions, either in prostitution or labor exploitation. (Read more about Spain's hot spot for human trafficking)
It has kept the Mossos d'Esquadra undercover unit, which is formally called the Central Unit Against Trafficking of Human Beings, very busy.
Sub-Inspector Xavier Cortes helped form the unit in 2007, and he says taking on the massive criminal organizations is a complex mission.
"Research techniques are different than a regular criminal investigation, such as the solving of a robbery," says Cortes, the ranking officer in the unit who doesn't work undercover and is comfortable with CNN revealing his identity.
"To investigate criminal organizations, what one cannot do is solve the crime. You have to locate and dismantle the organization... You get to know who the members are, how they live, how they interact, and how the organization is organized. Where the money comes from and where it goes - all this from many, many hours of analysis and operative work."
Another challenge, Cortes says, is infiltrating the groups to learn more about them.
"Considering in the vast majority of cases, the criminal organizations doing the trafficking of people that operate in Catalonia are organizations from foreign countries, it is almost impossible to get agents to infiltrate them."
That's where the use of informants comes in handy. The unit's biggest bust - a Chinese forced labor case involving 80 alleged sweatshops - came from two men who were fed up with their working environment and decided to come forward. One had been stabbed in the hand as he tried to collect evidence.
What started with a complaint by two men ended in a case so vast, it took three years to unravel the massive, tangled web of exploitation, and is only now going before the Spanish courts.
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