kim gives a hard sell, saying she s highly experienced and even cheaper than the other agents out there offering this fake father service. kim says the next step is for us to meet the potential fake dad she s got lined up. it would have to be somewhere private and we would need to bring a large deposit to secure the dad. we re obviously not going to hand over any cash to her, so we tell kim we ll think about it.
she s offering an illegal immigration route to stay in the uk. kim says she can find a british man to pose as the father. kim says she has a number of british men to choose from, and it s not long before the conversation turns to money. as the fixer, kim only wants a small fee for the man posing as a father will need to be paid a lot more.
they were in open vietnamese facebook groups, supposedly for people trying to find jobs. and the same words kept cropping up in the dozens of posts we came across. almost all of these posts mentioned red book. the red book is basically a british passport. these groups appear to provide an illicit marketplace to get hold of a uk passport. it wasn t clear how, but what we could tell was that it seemed to involve pregnant migrant women without a visa looking for british dads. most of the posts looked like they were from fake profiles and they all seem to want to move the conversation offline. were any of them even genuine? one name kept cropping up online. someone called thi kim.
kim told our undercover she could help her child get uk citizenship. technically, a baby born here doesn t get that automatically without at least one british parent. but kim says she knows a way to get around that for a price. she wants to meet up. we arrange for a researcher on our team to go undercover. we re meeting at the cafe in london. we don t know what kim looks like or if she s coming alone. so the team is nearby in case anything goes wrong. so that s the place over there. i can see our undercover researcher just sitting outside the cafe at the moment. no sign of the woman yet. our undercover researcher has
measures in place to prevent and detect immigration fraud. it told us caseworkers receive fraud awareness training and checks are conducted during the processing of immigration and passport applications. we contacted kim, twan and andrew about the issues raised in this film. none of them have responded to our request for comment. the fake fathers racket appears to be an open secret in different migrant communities, and it looks like it s been happening for years under the radar of the authorities. while fraudsters are cashing in, some women have been left with nothing to regret because of this.