UK anti-slavery commissioner says gangs are using AI-generated profiles to groom children

The UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner says criminal gangs are using AI-generated profiles to pose as children and groom young people into carrying drugs or cash. The warning, reported by Resultsense from an interview with The Independent, raises a practical question for platforms and policymakers: how do you spot synthetic accounts built to look ordinary?

Watch Desk analysis

What happened

Commissioner Eleanor Lyons says gangs can run several fake profiles at once, building trust before recruiting a child. The tasks can begin with apparently small requests, such as paying money into a bank account and withdrawing it later, before escalating into money-muling or coercion into violence, according to the report.

Resultsense says the interview was published on 24 October. It also reports that 7,045 children were referred as possible victims of modern slavery or trafficking in 2025, 17% more than the year before. Lyons is calling for a dedicated child exploitation strategy.

Why it matters

The warning is about more than fake accounts: it describes how AI could help offenders reach more children and make profiles harder to distinguish from real people. That complicates both platform moderation and the work of families, schools and public services trying to recognise when a child is being targeted.

Lyons says the children at risk are not only those already known to social services. The report says she is increasingly hearing from families whose children come from stable homes and good schools, potentially making them less visible to existing support systems.

Our read

A ban on younger users joining particular platforms, which Lyons welcomes, is only one part of the answer. The harder question is whether services can identify coordinated grooming without treating every new or unusual account as guilty by default. That calls for clear evidence about detection, reporting and support, not just another confident promise from a platform.

What to watch

• Whether the government responds to Lyons’s call for a dedicated child exploitation strategy.
• What evidence platforms provide about detecting coordinated, AI-assisted grooming.
• Whether support reaches children and families who are not already known to social services.

Discussion spark: Should platforms face a duty to detect coordinated, AI-assisted grooming proactively, or would that risk sweeping up too many ordinary accounts?

Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.