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After a National Crime Agency campaign, over half of the phony accounts used by people smugglers to promote migrant boat crossings on social media have been taken down.
According to the British FBI, in 2024, the number of accounts connected to people smuggling that were taken down increased by 40% as a result of referrals to social media firms.
They claim that during the 12 months ending in December, they caused the deletion of over 8,000 accounts, or more than 90% of all referrals.
This marks a significant increase on the 5,600 removed in 2023, and means more than 16,500 accounts have been taken down in total since the NCA started working with the four major social media companies just over three years ago.
Among those removed are posts falsely promoting small boat crossings from France to the UK as being via speedboat, posts offering prizes to migrants who refer a friend, accounts offering transport from Africa to southern Europe, and posts offering fake ID documents for sale.
The NCA launched its social media action plan with Meta, X, formerly Twitter, TikTok and YouTube in December 2021, to help build understanding of how organised criminals used their platforms to advertise illegal services and limit gangs' ability to exploit victims and plan dangerous illegal crossings.
Among those convicted following the operation was Amanj Hasan Zada from Preston, who was jailed for 17 years last November. Zada used video testimonials of those he'd successfully smuggled to promote his illicit smuggling trade.
Two other men, Dilshad Shamo and Ali Khdir from Caerphilly in South Wales, also used social media apps to publicise their deadly smuggling enterprise. They were convicted in November and await sentence.
Sophie Austin, Operations Manager at the NCA's Online Communication Centre, said: "Social media remains a key way the organised crime groups involved in people smuggling promoting their illegal services to migrants. It is a major part of their business model.
"Once migrants are engaged they then move conversations onto encrypted messaging apps where they are hidden from law enforcement.
"Taking down these accounts disrupts the activities of those criminal networks, we are devoting more resources to doing that as it is one of a number of ways we can actively target them and make their life more difficult.
"We continue to work closely with social media platforms to highlight such content and contribute to the development of detection capabilities.
"As a result, our partnership with them has seen a significant increase in the number of accounts we have identified and taken down in the last year - up more than 40 per cent since the end of 2023."
The social media action plan was implemented in December 2021 to bring greater collaboration against those crime groups using social media to recruit, communicate and advertise a range of illegal services.
It sees a greater shared understanding of the threat from organised immigration crime between social media companies and the NCA, as well as a more streamlined, two-way system of communication.
Tackling organised immigration crime remains a key priority for the NCA, and we continue to use the full suite of powers at our disposal to disrupt networks through targeting their social media offerings, financial flows and their supply routes for boats, engines and maritime equipment.
