GB NEWS
Young British women, often drunk and sometimes in states of undress, are being used by ruthless people smugglers in social media video advertisements, GB News can exclusively reveal.
The videos are included on multiple accounts, which expert sources claim are being used to entice young males to use the services of the criminal gangs and travel to Europe and the UK.
Several of the accounts, which have hundreds of thousands of followers, were found on the social media network Instagram.
Along with the many videos of young women, are others showing migrants using people smuggling routes by land and by sea.
GB News was handed the evidence by a cyber contact who works on ‘machine learning algorithms’ and who discovered multiple accounts he believes are “fronts for criminal people smuggling gangs”.
Another source said they believed this to be “an advertising campaign to predominantly North Africans seeking passage to be smuggled into Europe and Britain”.
The social media posts are similar to those used regularly by smuggling gangs last year to entice mainly young male Albanians to travel to the UK.
Those videos showed young men apparently ‘enjoying the high life’ around London and other locations, with wads of cash and sports cars.
A spokesman for Instagram told GB News it had opened an investigation after being made aware of the videos.
Earlier this month, Home Secretary Suella Braverman condemned the organised criminal gangs exploiting social media to tout for business.
She said: “Heartless people smugglers are using social media to promote their despicable services and charge people thousands of pounds to make the illegal journey into the UK in unsafe boats.”
“They must not succeed,” she added.
The Home Secretary was commenting as the Government announced that a number of social media companies planned to team up with UK law enforcement to help crack down on the people smuggling posts.
The voluntary cooperation agreement between social media firms and the National Crime Agency will seek to redirect people away from smugglers’ content, in a similar way that algorithms are used to tackle online extremist material.
Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok and X/Twitter have all signed up to the plans.
GB News has also been told that people smugglers are increasingly moving away from including text in their video posts, to avoid specific algorithms, and are often using emoji characters instead.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-news-people-smugglers-drunk-british-girls-instagram