On 4 February, a lorry stopped in Dover was found to be concealing 33 people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the migrants were not being clandestinely moved into the UK – they were being smuggled out of the country.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the lorry was about to board a ferry to France, in one of a series of recent cases of outbound people smuggling detected in Britain.

There has been a “spike in arrests” for lorry drivers taking large payments to move migrants to the European mainland on ferries and through the Channel Tunnel, officials say, but the true scale of the activity is unknown.

Who is behind outbound smuggling?

The crossings are being facilitated by people smugglers who are advertising the illicit journeys on social media, increasingly using snappy videos on TikTok to reach potential customers.

One such video from a smuggler jailed in June carried the caption “UK to France” against a background of a ferry sailing over serene blue seas, while other posts used photos of lorries with the message “UK to France – inbox message” and claimed that the journeys would be “safe done”.

Jaskirat Singh, 25, earned at least £185,000 through his clandestine travel service between December 2024 and March 2026, the Crown Prosecution Service said, and claimed that he arranged for up to 60 people to be driven to France every week over nine months. The evidence suggested lorry drivers were paid around £5,000 for each crossing.

A spokesman for the NCA said that several investigations are ongoing. “The same gangs involved in smuggling people out of the UK illegally are often involved in bringing people in too,” he told The i Paper.

“These gangs not only threaten the border security of both the UK and France, but also risk the lives of those they transport. We have seen people utilising the services of these groups to circumvent French visa restrictions or evade law enforcement attention.”

Why are people being smuggled out of Britain?

Some smuggling gangs investigated by British authorities have targeted particular groups, such as specific nationalities or people who have overstayed certain categories of visa and have no permission to remain in the UK.

One criminal group provided services to fugitives who were seeking to leave the UK clandestinely while wanted for serious crimes such as child sex offences and murder.

While most cases of outbound smuggling involve people who have been living in Britain, last year a gang was jailed for using the UK as a transit point from North Africa to France.

For the price of up to £1,200 per trip, the group organised migrants’ travel to Britain on tourist visas and then swiftly packed them onto lorries towards France via Dover.

Next month, seven men will go on trial at Canterbury Crown Court accused of moving predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals out of the UK in lorries, in what the NCA said was “an attempt to avoid border controls and French entry restrictions”.

The case follows a surveillance operation in January that tracked people being driven from London to Whitstable in taxis and then loaded into a lorry. When the HGV was stopped on its approach to the ferry port in Dover, 23 Bangladeshi nationals were found on board.

What is the scale of outbound smuggling?

The NCA said that while the scale of people smuggling out of Britain is nowhere near the scale of inbound activity, there was a “spike in arrests” last year.

Between July and October, nine lorry drivers were arrested in Kent for people smuggling offences after being found attempting to board trains or ferries to France, while carrying people illegally in their vehicles.

Some drivers directly assist criminal gangs in loading people into their trucks, the NCA said, while in others they have left their vehicles unlocked in specific locations.

But the number of successful outbound smuggling operations is ultimately unknown, because any official figures rely on people being detected by the authorities.

“The big challenge is always the clandestine character of this migration,” said Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory. “We don’t have great evidence on the lorry route, we just don’t have the data.”