British men are taking payments of up to £10,000 to add their names to the birth certificates of migrant women’s children, according to reports.
A BBC Newsnight investigation has found scammers are using Facebook to find willing participants and claim to have “helped” thousands of women with the move, which helps the child to get UK citizenship and the mother a residency route.
Facebook told the BBC such content was banned by its rules.
A BBC researcher went undercover, posing as a pregnant woman who was in the UK illegally, and spoke to people offering the services.
One agent, who went by the name Thai, told her he had a number of British men who could act as fake fathers and offered a “full package” for £11,000.
He introduced the undercover researcher to a British man called Andrew, who he said would pose as a father and would be paid £8,000 from the total fee, the BBC reports.
A child is automatically British by birth if a migrant woman is in the UK illegally but gives birth to a child fathered by a British citizen or a man with indefinite leave to remain.
The mother can then apply for a family visa, which will give her the right to remain in the UK and apply for citizenship in due course.
Last year, 4,860 family visas were granted to “other dependants”, a category that includes those applying to stay in the UK as parents of British children.
Deliberately giving false details on a birth certificate is a criminal offence.
The Home Office told the BBC it had measures in place to prevent and detect immigration fraud using false birth certificates.
The BBC was told that the practice occurred in many different migrant communities including those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, and had been happening for many years.
The investigation found that the illegal practice was advertised widely on some Vietnamese Facebook groups for jobseekers.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, told the BBC it did not allow “the solicitation of adoptions or birth certificate fraud on Facebook”. It said it would continue to remove content that violated its policies.
