Children targeted by social media recruitment ads for money mules

Criminals are overtly targeting young people to become money mules. Two-thirds of all advertisements aimed at attracting new recruits appear on social media channels, according to Nick Sharp, deputy director at the National Economic Crime Centre.

“The ‘herders’ [recruiters] who are putting these things on Snapchat, TikTok, and everywhere else you can get to young people, are not even [disguising] what it is. They are not deterred by moderation or having an account switched off because they can just open up a new one pretty much straight away,” Sharp said during a panel on money muling the UK Finance Economic Crime Congress.  

Fraud involving money muling had increased 25% across the EU in the last five years, with UK national fraud reporting agency Action Fraud recording a 10% increase in reports involving money muling in the last year, he added. One quarter of all those enticed into money muling were under the age of 21.

Katie Darlington, financial exploitation lead at charity The Children’s Society, said adverts also frequently feature the trappings of wealth as herders posing as influencers seek to lure in more young victims

Sexploitation

Furthermore, Darlington said, money muling was often linked to other exploitation of children, including sex trafficking and county lines, which involves criminal gangs grooming children to deal drugs.

A relatively new twist was the overlap that money muling had with image-based exploitation, she added.

“There is an overlap with what you may have heard called sextortion. I’m hearing a lot from financial institutions of cases where children have been manipulated and they’ve shared images. What the perpetrator used to say was ‘give us some money or we will share then with Mum and Dad’. What they are saying is ‘you’ve got to move some money through your account for us, or else’. What an impossible choice that it for a child.”

She has seen examples of children being exploited as money mules across all UK financial providers , including accounts aimed specifically at children.

Collaboration

Efforts are being made to combat this, said Darlington, highlighting a project where industry, law enforcement and charities including The Children’s Society work together with the business community including hotels, shops and licensed premises to protect vulnerable children. Operation Makesafe involves all parties working together, to ensure business owners and employees can spot the signs of exploitation, “and everyone knows what to do if they spot those signs of exploitation”, she said.

Darlington added that there was a similar opportunity for collaboration with the financial sector to protect children.

Sharp said sharing intelligence with law enforcement was key, and pointed to guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office on how data can be shared under existing legislation.

Social media giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced in October it was expanding its pilot data-sharing programme, the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE). Following the pilot, run in conjunction with NatWest and Metro Bank, Meta closed 20,000 accounts run by scammers.