Criminal gangs using AI to ‘make it easier’ to exploit British children

Rising numbers of British children are falling victim to criminal gangs as artificial intelligence (AI) makes it “easier than ever” for criminals to reach and exploit them, the UK’s anti-slavery commissioner has warned.

Children are being groomed and recruited into carrying drugs or money through AI-generated profiles imitating youngsters that are difficult for experts to spot, Eleanor Lyons said.

Criminals are increasingly using online spaces to target children unknown to social services for money laundering and drugs acts, meaning the victims are often “out of reach” of authorities and a different demographic to those who have historically been considered at the highest-risk for trafficking, she warned.

New data shows child trafficking rates are rising annually, with 7,045 children referred as potential victims of trafficking and modern slavery in 2025 – up 17 per cent on the previous year. Of these, more than 60 per cent were British nationals.

“Much like people in their day-to-day lives, criminals are using AI to make their jobs easier to more reach more people at scale, at speed, and a broader cohort,” Ms Lyons told The Independent.

“So for children, it may be making fake profiles online, managing them to chat across multiple profiles to try and build trust to groom and create that relationship online”. But she said AI is “making it far more hard for us to understand actually what's a real profile and what's not”.

Sextortion rates amid under-18s are also soaring as criminals increasingly groom children into sharing child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) and then use it to blackmail them, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Last year, US officials reported children were being given AI-generated scripts and coerced into “recruiting” other victims. AI-generated CSAM is also being used to target children for trafficking.

“The acts that the children are asked to carry out can sometimes seem on the surface quite innocuous,” Ms Lyons said. “It can be things like asking them to put a little bit of money in their bank account and then to take it out the next day. The sums can increase in value, get bigger and bigger and bigger, and they're being used essentially for money laundering and cleaning criminal money”.

But she said children were also sometimes coerced into committing violent acts on behalf of gangs. If they refuse, she says the outcomes can be “truly horrifying”.

Ms Lyons warned children from stable backgrounds that are not known to social services are particularly targeted for drugs and money trafficking in what she called a “changing pattern of exploitation”.

“Sometimes criminals are using those children to carry because they are beyond the reach of where local authorities or law enforcement would think to look,” she explained.

“Six or seven years ago, the group that we were really concerned about were often children who were care experienced, who maybe were going missing, who were out of support structures that we would love to have for a child.

“More and more in my work, I'm beginning to speak to parents and hear from survivors that were in a loving family environment, they had all the care in the world, they went to a good school. They were bright. They were engaged. They had friends. They were very much part of a really supportive community structure. What has been happening with the online world means that actually we're seeing more children across society from different groups of society being targeted by perpetrators, often in a way that's less visible to us.”

Her warnings come as children under the age of 16 will be banned from online platforms including Instagram and Facebook under the government’s incoming social media ban. While Ms Lyons said the move was “positive for children”, she warned more needs to be done to protect them from trafficking.

“At the moment under the online safety act, there are clear roles and responsibilities for tech companies and actually I don't think they are fulfilling all their obligations,” she said.

“I also do fear that the tech companies aren't always doing as much as they should do to actually act to take down harmful content which does include children”.

She urged the government to introduce a specific child exploitation strategy and for policymakers to be more proactive in preventing criminals from reaching children online.

“The scary thing is that our policy response isn't keeping up at the speed that perpetrators are using new technology,” she said. “We want to get on the front foot.”