The National Crime Agency (NCA) has claimed that its referrals to social media companies led to a 40% increase in the removal of accounts linked to people smuggling over 2024.

The NCA said it has triggered the removal of more than 8,000 accounts – representing more than 90% of all referrals – during the twelve months to the end of December, and a significant increase on the 5,600 removed in 2023.

This means today more than 16,500 accounts have been taken down since the NCA started working with four major social media companies just over three years ago, when the agency launched its social media action plan with Meta, X, TikTok and YouTube in 2021.

According to the NCA, that strategy helped build the agency’s understanding of how organised criminals use popular social media platforms to advertise illegal services, allowing law enforcement to limit these gangs’ ability to exploit victims and plan dangerous illegal crossings.

Among posts removed through this action are those 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.

Other posts targeted by the NCA included smugglers using video testimonials from those they had smuggled into the UK, the successful conviction of which resulted in one individual being sentenced to seventeen years in November.

“Social media remains a key way the organised crime groups involved in people smuggling promote their illegal services to migrants. It is a major part of their business model,” said Sophie Austin, operations manager at the NCA’s Online Communication Centre.

“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.

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Rooting out people smugglers, as well as other online criminals, is at the heart of an EU push to pressure Big Tech firms to change their encryption tactics.

Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, announced last week that it was asking EU member states to gather examples of how end-to-end encryption technologies are being exploited by criminals, with the agency’s director general, Catherine De Bolle, calling on tech firms such as Meta and Signal to give law enforcement full access to encrypted data and messages across platforms.