People smugglers use YouTube to teach migrants how to enter UK 

People smugglers are using social media networks to teach people how to enter the UK illegally, according to the Telegraph.

Adverts published on Facebook entitled “Road to Europe, Road to Life” say that ships are the best option “because all its parts are made from iron with a thickness of 12 millimetres. The boat engine is 800 horsepower and its speed 14 miles per hour whilst it’s empty.”

The news comes despite ongoing efforts to put pressure on these platforms to crackdown on the pages.

Last year the UN warned that tech companies were failing to crackdown on smugglers who were using their platforms to lure migrants with the promise of safe passage whilst victims are unaware of the dangers they face.

“More often than not, these adverts are quite reassuring, they create an illusion this is very much normal travel, it’s safe it’s easy,” head of Britain’s Organised Immigration Crime taskforce told Reuters last year.

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“Tragically, when you look at quite a few of these adverts they might be advertising big luxury yachts or ships. When the migrants turn up to get transported they find they are being packed onto a rib or a small boat without safety jackets.”

Europol’s Migrant Smuggling Centre estimates that 90 per cent of migrants have arrived in the EU using criminal organisations. According to the IOM, people smuggling is the third largest business for criminals.

Last month the bodies of 39 Vietnamese immigrants were found in a refrigerated lorry in an industrial park in Grays, Essex, which came from Zeebrugge in Belgium, a case which highlighted the risks migrants take to enter the UK.

In August the body of an Iraqi refugee attempting to cross the Channel, a strip of water which connects Britain to France, was washed up in Zeebrugge wearing a lifejacket he had fashioned for himself out of plastic bottles.

In the first six months of this year 1,473 refugees attempted the crossing compared to 586 in the whole of 2018. The largest number of people are from Eritrea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.