People Smuggling: Internet

The online advertising of unlawful immigration services offence is one of a suite of measures in the Border Security Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 designed to work together to tackle organised immigration crime. The offence seeks to make it harder for vile smugglers to operate by criminalising a critical component of their business model – through disrupting their online operations and ability to connect with migrants. It enables law enforcement to intervene more easily, without needing to link the online post to a specific instance of unlawful immigration.

The Home Office works closely with its law enforcement partners to ensure they have the funding, tools, and expertise they need to tackle organised immigration crime, including its facilitation online. This investment supports more officers, and smarter intelligence gathering, helping agencies identify and stop these gangs no matter who they are or where they are. Utilising these capabilities, a significant amount of work is currently being undertaken by operational agencies to identify those responsible for creating or publishing this type of content, with the NCA having several active cases in development.

The Home Office and NCA also work collaboratively with social media companies to ensure swift removal of unlawful immigration content, with over 28,000 accounts, pages and posts, identified by the Home Office and NCA referred since 2024. This partnership also enables social media companies to utilise insights shared by the NCA to improve their content moderation and detection of unlawful immigration content. Additionally, the Online Safety Act places statutory duties which requires online services, including social media companies, to identify and mitigate the risk of illegal content on their platforms, including unlawful immigration material. In addition, online services are required to implement robust measures and reporting systems to ensure they can swiftly remove illegal content once identified.