The online ‘superstars’ driving UK drug trade
Social media giants are helping fuel an influx of Albanian drug workers into Britain by allowing influencers to promote a criminal lifestyle and become superstars. Sunday Express investigations editor ZAK GARNER-PURKIS reports
ONE OF the country’s biggest online celebrities, Aleks Visha rose to fame through live virtual tours of UK cannabis farms and online boasts about him and his brother Dor’s criminal exploits. Between them, they have more than a million followers on various social media platforms.
Aleks, dubbed the “King of Tiktok”, claims in one clip to be overseeing a British drugs empire producing up to 2,300 plants every two months.
In another, he calls up his brother – who himself boasts a social media following of more than 200,000 – to celebrate a “harvest”.
Dor and Aleks are far from alone in sharing these types of videos.
A major Sunday Express investigation uncovered viral Albanian language content, viewed millions of times, which promotes the lifestyle of UK drug workers who have illegally travelled to Britain, even showing viewers how to travel here.
We also discovered how Albanian language videos promoting UK drug farms have been posted on Tiktok and Instagram for years.
From digital wanted posters seeking information on thieves to clips of violent robberies, our dossier of evidence reveals how social media is being harnessed by gangs as a tool for crime.
Vulnerable Albanian teenagers are regularly exposed to their posts, encouraging them to travel to Britain illegally to get rich quick, according to young people we interviewed in the capital Tirana. Instagram and Tiktok took down
‘Social media companies must take responsibility’
content highlighted to them by the Sunday Express but neither removed the accounts of the two brothers.
Last night former Home Secretary Priti Patel declared: “The British public will be disgusted by Tiktok and Instagram for allowing criminals to promote their lifestyles and encourage others to come to Britain illegally to produce drugs.
“Material like this is wrong and social media companies must take responsibility to remove this content and to work with our law enforcement agencies to identify quickly the people producing this content so they can face the full force of the law.”
She added: “I applaud the Sunday Express for the investigation into the brazen criminality and trust that our agencies will use this evidence to act urgently and deal with those responsible.
“The returns agreements we have with Albania, which I negotiated, should mean we can act to remove vile criminals from our country promptly to protect the public and to deter others from seeking to enter the UK illegally.”
University of Essex senior lecturer Dr Alexandros K Antoniou said the Sunday Express findings are another “worrying” example of how social media is “facilitating” real-world crime.
The media law expert added that the revelation that two of Albania’s biggest online celebrities had promoted a criminal lifestyle in the UK was a concerning development to the influencer phenomenon, where regular people have achieved huge stardom on the internet through their social media accounts.
“They are individuals who rose to fame by cultivating online followers and they do so because they cultivate trust,” he said.
“Trust then seems to be exploited in a way that encourages unlawful or at least harmful activity.”
He added: “What’s really worrying is the impact that this person may have, particularly on younger generations because we haven’t been thinking about them as criminals or people who facilitate or encourage the commission of crime.”
Tirana local Loku, 25, said that social media provided both the inspiration and means for his plan to cross the Channel on a dinghy to become a drugs worker last year.
He was convinced to make the trip after seeing gratuitous online displays of wealth from those claiming to have run UK cannabis farms.
He said: “Naturally I’ve seen videos on social media of them. Some earned £200,000 or £300,000.
“As soon as they came back they bought a car, opened a business. They moved around the city, in Tirana or other cities across Albania and women wanted them.
“When you see this kind of people an obsession enters your mind, like ‘Why shouldn’t I have these things also?’”
When he decided to go to Britain, Loku said he used Tiktok to connect with a trafficker to make the trip. Ultimately he was unsuccessful and returned to Albania but it remains his dream to earn his fortune in a UK drugs farm.
Vulnerable Albanian teenagers are also being regularly exposed to content encouraging them to travel to Britain illegally, according to many young people the Sunday Express met during a reporting trip to Tirana.
Student Rafaela Xhaja, 19, said: “I have seen recorded videos of people in cannabis houses and videos that show how the transport process from Albania into England works. I think that a part of youth gets influenced by the videos.
“We, the youth, face a lot of problems here so people may get influenced into paying thousands of euros in order to go into England and afterwards work in cannabis houses.”
Ms Xhaja said she had repeatedly informed the social network she was not interested in these videos but they continued appearing to her.
She told us these clips had been viewed millions of times. This claim was supported by UK cannabis farm-related content found on Tiktok by the Sunday Express which had been viewed more than four million times.
Ms Xhaja agreed that social media was a factor in the influx of more than 30,000 Albanian asylum seekers who travelled to the UK illegally between 2019 and 2023, and the 176 children from the Balkan state who went missing from
accommodation during this period. Responding to the Sunday Express findings, the National Crime Agency said it “pursues and disrupts the organised crime groups presenting the greatest risk to the UK’S security and economy”.
“We work with partners in the UK and all around the world, including in Albania, to understand the threat, identify the most harmful suspects and networks, and ultimately protect the UK public from serious and organised crime.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We expect tech companies to have robust processes in place to swiftly remove illegal content.
“The Online Safety Act will introduce measures requiring platforms to identify and take down content relating to the sale of drugs online.
“The UK and Albanian authorities have a close working partnership. We take every opportunity to intercept criminals and speed up the removal of those with no legal right to be in the UK.”
Neither Instagram nor Tiktok removed the accounts of the two brothers but both took down other content highlighted by the Express. Instagram’s owner Meta also declined a request for an interview with its President of Global Affairs, former Lib Dem leader Sir Nick Clegg.
A Meta spokesman said “buying, selling or soliciting drugs is not allowed on our platforms”.
“Our teams use a mix of technology and human review to remove this content as quickly as possible, and we work with the police and youth organisations to get better at detection,” he added. “We’ve also worked with industry experts to tackle the issue of people smuggling for a number of years and when we find content co-ordinating this illegal activity we remove it from our platforms.”
Tiktok also rejected the Express’s request for an interview and said in a statement: “Tiktok works closely with UK law enforcement, the National Crime Agency and organisations such as Stop the Traffik to fight this industry-wide issue, and our steadfast efforts helped reduce the number of small boat crossings last year, according to Border officials.
“We continue to maintain a zero tolerance approach to human exploitation and proactively find over 95 per cent of content we remove for breaking these rules.”
‘We face problems here so people get influenced’