Smuggling web pages ‘not being removed’

Facebook, You tube and other social media companies are not removing pages believed to be linked to people-smuggling because they do not breach terms and conditions, MPS have been told.

Criminals are taking advantage of end-to - end encryption and closed groups to facilitate the movement of mi grants from France to the UK, a senior official from the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.

Rob Jones, director of threat leadership at the NCA, said this had been “challenging” for the agency. He said: “In the first five months of the year we referred over 1,200 pages related to organised immigration crime to social media companies for closure. Now, of those ,578 were closed and 485 were rejected as not breaching terms and conditions.”