Smuggler reveals how he has helped more than 1,000 people cross Channel

Image source, Reuters

Andrew Harding, Khue Luu and Patrick Clahane

BBC News

A prolific Vietnamese people smuggler, who entered the UK illegally this year in a small boat, has told the BBC he forges visa documents for other Vietnamese who plan to make the same crossing.

The man, whom we are calling Thanh, is now claiming UK asylum and told us he has spent almost 20 years – his entire adult life – in the smuggling industry.

He has been in prison, led a gang working on the northern coast of France, and claims to have helped more than 1,000 people to risk their lives to cross the Channel.

The self-confessed criminal met the BBC at a secret location to share detailed information about the mechanics of the international smuggling industry.

Thanh walks into the room cautiously, dark eyes moving fast as if searching for possible exit routes. A small, neat, quietly authoritative figure in a black polo neck.

There are handshakes and he says “hello” in a soft, strongly accented voice. Beyond that, we speak almost exclusively through a Vietnamese translator.

After months of phone calls and one brief meeting, the interview takes place on a grey day in a small hotel room, in a northern English town that we are choosing not to name here.

We decided there was a strong public interest in hearing about Thanh’s life in the smuggling trade, which could only be secured in return for agreeing to keep his identity confidential. He fears being recognised not only by the British authorities but by Vietnamese criminals in the UK.

Vietnam emerged in the first months of this year – suddenly and unexpectedly – as the largest single source of migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats.

Many Vietnamese migrants have cited failing businesses and debts at home for their decision to seek work in the UK. Their first step, experts have suggested, is often to access Europe by taking advantage of a legal work visa system in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe.

This is where Thanh’s forgery operation comes in, he says. He helps create the fake paperwork needed to get the legitimate work visas.

“I can’t justify breaking the law. But it’s a very lucrative business,” Thanh said calmly, insisting he doesn’t provide forgeries for people seeking UK visas.

We know from our interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and their clients that people pay between $15,000 (£11,570) and $20,000 (£15,470) to travel from Vietnam to mainland Europe and then to cross the Channel.

It is a dangerous business. More than 50 people have been killed crossing the Channel in small boats already this year, making 2024 the deadliest on record. For the first time, the figures include one Vietnamese.

When our team first made contact with Thanh in mainland Europe earlier this year, we knew he was going to attempt to get to the UK with other Vietnamese. He later let us know he had crossed the Channel from northern France, in a small boat.

Thanh told us he had first flown from Vietnam to Hungary on a legitimate visa – although he had acquired it using forged documents.

He had then flown on to Paris and stayed for a few days in a “safe house”, organised by a Vietnamese smuggling gang on the city’s outskirts. Soon after then, he was taken in a group by minibus to the coast and, finally, put in the hands of one of the Kurdish gangs that control the small boat crossings.

“Once you’re on the boat, you get treated like everyone else,” he said. “It’s overcrowded.”

But the Vietnamese passengers pay three or four times more money to the gangs handling the crossing routes, he told us, “so we get the advantage of being given a place more quickly”.

In fact, our sources suggest the Vietnamese pay roughly twice the usual rate.

The journey Thanh described is now an established route from Vietnam to the UK – a path heavily promoted by smugglers on Facebook, who charge clients for forged documents, flights, buses, and a place on a flimsy rubber boat. Payment for a successful Channel crossing is only made after arrival in the UK.

And Thanh had been lucky, he told us, evading French police patrolling the beaches near Calais, and crossing in an inflatable boat on his first attempt.

Or perhaps he tried several times. Over the months that we were in contact with him, he changed elements of the story he told us – perhaps to cover his tracks and to avoid giving potential clues about his identity to the UK authorities.

Thanh asked for asylum when he was interviewed by a British immigration official – explaining he had left Vietnam because he had got into debt to gangsters when his business failed. His life, he said, was in danger.

He told the official he had been trafficked to the UK in order to work for a gang to pay off his debt.

We had heard similar stories from the Vietnamese we encountered in northern France.

When we first established contact with Thanh, he portrayed himself as a desperate migrant, first stuck in France, and then trapped in the UK’s asylum system, living in a crowded hotel, unable to work, and waiting to learn his fate.

But over time, we began to learn the truth. Or rather, Thanh began to reveal the extent to which his extraordinary life story has been built on a series of elaborate, even outrageous, lies.

Sitting opposite me on a sofa, Thanh admitted that he had not been trafficked to the UK. He had made up that story as part of his asylum claim. And he went much further, claiming that all the Vietnamese migrants he knew of had been told to offer a version of the same lie.

“Yes. A lie. I was not trafficked,” he said.

Migration experts and NGOs have a range of views about the scale of trafficking from Vietnam.

One French prosecutor told us that many Vietnamese were in debt to the smugglers and ended up working in UK cannabis farms. But he played down the idea of an organised supply chain, insisting the smuggling system was more like a haphazard series of stepping stones, with each stage controlled by separate gangs. Finding work in the UK was, he said, about luck and opportunism.

Other experts insist that many, if not most, Vietnamese migrants are victims of trafficking, and that those being taken across the Channel are in fact a cheap and easy source of labour for criminal gangs in the UK. A government registry of people suspected of being victims of modern slavery has consistently shown a high number of Vietnamese.

“It is often not possible, or helpful, to differentiate when a person has been trafficked or smuggled, especially as exploitation can happen at any time,” said Jamie Fookes, UK and Europe advocacy manager at Anti-Slavery International.

“Those crossing will often have to pay either through extortion, or from being exploited in some form of forced labour or criminality on the other side.”

Safe migration routes, he added, would be the only way to prevent traffickers taking advantage of people’s desperation.

But Thanh maintains that most Vietnamese migrants aren’t trafficked, and that it is just a line used to claim asylum.

“That’s the way it’s done. [People lie about being trafficked] in order to continue the asylum process safely,” he said.

Thanh clearly has a motive to lie about this. If he were to be caught forging documents for people who went on to be trafficked, the penalties would be far more serious than for smuggling.

In our reporting we have sought to corroborate the details of Thanh’s story – and in many instances have done so successfully. But a cloud of doubt hangs, inevitably, over elements of it.

Thanh says he first left Vietnam in 2007. He was in his late teens or early twenties. He had already dropped out of school to work in a textile factory in the south of the country. But his family wanted him to head abroad, to Europe, in search of higher wages.

“I borrowed $6,000 (£4,624) from relatives and neighbours [to pay for the trip]. A lot of people had already made the same journey. We Vietnamese have always travelled like this – to wherever it is easier to make money,” he told me.

That journey first took him to a farm outside Prague, in the Czech Republic. He spent more than a year picking spring onions and other vegetables before deciding he could do better in Germany. Crossing the border illegally in a minibus, Thanh says he threw away his passport and other documents, and chose a new name.

And he went a step further.

When he arrived in Berlin, he told the authorities he was 14 years old.

The smugglers who had charged him $1,000 (£771) to get him into Germany had advised him it would be easier if he claimed he was under 16.

“I looked young in those days. Nobody challenged me on that.”

And so, the German authorities promptly sent a man they took to be a boy to a children’s home 45 minutes’ drive from the German capital, where Thanh quickly got to work, selling black-market cigarettes in the local town.

Thanh says he stayed in Germany for about two years. He left the children’s home, found a girlfriend, and soon became a father. But a police crackdown started to affect his income from selling cigarettes. And so, in 2010, he decided to try to reach the UK.

Crossing into France without his new family, he tells us, he threw away his German documents and invented yet another false identity.

By then, thousands of migrants were trying to cross the Channel to the UK by hiding in lorries and shipping containers. Thanh says he made several attempts but was unsuccessful.

“I had bad luck. The patrols were very strict. They used dogs to detect us hiding in a container.” He claims to have reached Dover at one point, only for the truck to be returned with him and a group of other migrants still inside.

Stuck in France, camping in a forest near Dunkirk, Thanh was offered work by Vietnamese people smugglers. It was a job at which, he says, he soon excelled.

“I had to provide food and supplies and arrange to send people to the lorries at particular times. I did not recruit people, but I was paid €300 (£250) for each successful crossing,” said Thanh, insisting that none of his passengers were being trafficked or exploited.

“We just provided a service. No-one was forced. It was illegal, but it was very, very profitable.”

A few years later, the same gang – no longer linked to Thanh, he says – would be involved in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were discovered, suffocated, inside a lorry trailer in Essex.

We need to gloss over some details of what Thanh says happened to him over the next few years in order to continue to hide his identity. He rose within a gang to become one of its senior members. But eventually, after being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for several years in Europe, he returned to Vietnam.

At which point, he might have left the smuggling world behind him. But, as he puts it now, his own reputation pulled him back in.

“People in Europe contacted me asking for help,” he told us.

“I’d already helped about 1,000 people to get to the UK successfully, so I was well known for that success.”

In 2017, he says he re-entered the smuggling trade – only this time, Thanh wasn’t smuggling people, he was forging documents for them.

Bank statements, payslips, tax invoices, anything that European embassies required to prove that people applying for student, or work, or business visas had the necessary funds to ensure they planned to return to Vietnam.

“I had a lot of clients. Depending on which embassy it was, we would provide forged bank statements or other documents.

“First, we would submit these online. If certain embassies needed to check with banks, then we’d put real cash into a bank account. We had arrangements with staff at certain banks,” Thanh explained.

“The clients couldn’t access the money themselves, but the bank staff would show the [falsified] details to embassy staff. We worked with lots of different types of Vietnamese banks.”

An expert in Vietnam told us that banking fraud is “quite common”, and there were instances of bank staff colluding with criminals to forge documents.

Thanh tells us he is not proud of his work as a forger – that he had known it was illegal and that he had done it simply to support his family. But at times he sounds boastful, observing that “people trust me, I have never failed”, and insisting his work was “not a serious crime in Vietnam”.

By now, Thanh had a new family in Vietnam. But earlier this year, he decided to leave.

It is not entirely clear why. At one point, he tells us his business had been struggling. He also mentions problems with the Vietnamese police – but he plays them down. Perhaps it is caution. But it strikes us that a lifetime of deception might have affected his ability, or his desire, to distinguish truth from fiction.

So why talk to us? Why risk blowing his cover in the UK? And why continue with his forgery business here, even now?

Thanh portrays himself as a repentant figure who now regrets his life of crime and wants to speak out to prevent other Vietnamese people from making the same mistakes. Above all, he wants to warn them against coming to the UK illegally, saying it is simply not worth it.

“I just want people in Vietnam to understand that it’s not worth borrowing lots of money to travel here. It’s not so easy for illegal arrivals to find work or make money.

“And when they do make money it’s less than in the past. It’s no better than in Germany or other European countries. I’ve been trying to find work in the grey economy, but I’ve not been successful,” he told us.

“If you want to work on a cannabis farm, there are opportunities, but I don’t want to get involved in more illegal activities now. I don’t want to land up in prison.”

Thanh urges the UK and European governments to make a bigger effort to publicise the fact there are no jobs here for illegal migrants. He also blames smuggling gangs for lying to their clients about the realities and opportunities.

But he says people back in Vietnam are hard to dissuade, suspecting those trying to warn against travelling to Europe are “being selfish and trying to keep the job opportunities for themselves”.

When we confront Thanh, repeatedly, about his hypocrisy and his own continued involvement in the elements of smuggling industry, he shrugs. It is just business.

“We don’t force anyone to do what they do. They ask us for help, as they would from any business. There’s no trafficking involved. If you have a good reputation, the clients come to you, without threats or violence.”

But what about the dangers involved – the surging number of deaths in the Channel?

“My role is just a small one in a much bigger process.”

Thanh acknowledges that his life, and that of his family back in Vietnam, would be in danger if the smuggling gangs found out he had been talking to us. When pushed, he admits to some regrets.

“If I could start again, I would not leave Vietnam. I think my life would be much better if I had stayed at home. I’ve faced so many struggles. I don’t have a bright future.”

Was he telling the truth?

At the end of our interview, he stands up, ready to leave, and for the first time, a flicker of concern, or perhaps irritation, seems to flit across his face.

Perhaps he had said too much.

Additional reporting by Kathy Long

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