Advertisements for the film said that it was based on the Rockefeller White Slavery Report and on the investigation of the Vice Trust by District Attorney Whitman. In a news item in 17 Dec 1913 NYDM, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. denied that any films about white-slave traffic had his sanction or were in any way approved by the Bureau of Social Hygiene, through which he conducted his investigations of white-slave traffic. Furthermore, he stated that "the use of my name in any such connection is absolutely unauthorized, and that I and those associated with me in this work regard this method of exploiting vice as not only injudicious but positively harmful." Var commented, "there's a laugh on the Rockefeller investigators in the play in the personality of one of the white slavers, a physical counterpart of John D., himself so striking as to make the observer sit up and wonder whether the granger of Pocantico Hills really came down to pose for the Universal."
       According to modern sources, the film was cast by Imp editor Jack Cohn and was made without the knowledge of Imp officials. Director Tucker quit Imp and went to the London Film Company in England after Traffic in Souls was shot. Jack Cohn cut it from ten to six reels. The popularity of the film (modern sources claim that it cost $5,700 to make and that it grossed approximately $450,000) touched off a wave of white-slave pictures.
       The National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures viewed the film on 27 Oct 1913 and passed it with five minor alterations.
       The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screened highlights from Traffic in Souls during a program called "A Century Ago: The Films of 1913," at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, CA, on 6 Dec 2013, according to that day's LAT. The film was also included on a 2008 DVD set called Perils of the New Land: Films of the Immigrant Experience (1910-1915).
       See also The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913).