children in camps in syria begging for hours on end. they re asking for tiktok gifts that can be withdrawn as real money. but that money isn t all going to them. we ve been following more than 300 accounts going live on tiktok, trying to work out where that money is going. tiktok has got a ferocious appetite for growth. the longer that they spend on the platform, the more revenue they generate. how people living in desperate circumstances suddenly have the phones, internet and tiktok accounts to go live. tiktok is creating an enabling an ecosystem that runs on the exploitation of people s suffering. ..and why so many of the donors come from the uk.
facilitate these transactions. from the $106 we donated to mohammed s account, tiktok took $73. that s almost 70%. the money transfer took 10% of what we had left. and hamid told us tiktok middlemen take 35% of what s left after that. so from those 106 dollars, mohammad would have just over $19. and often, the families we spoke to get much, much less. but in the camps, jobs are scarce and there are few other options. kawtaneh and her family sell scraps from the rubbish dump for a living. it s dangerous work, pays next to nothing, and comes with many health risks.
so, mohammed kept chatting to martha. martha set up an account for us and sent us the username and password. then, we got an invitation to join an agency called giant mena. martha contacted us nearly every day, putting pressure on us to go live. tiktok s terms and conditions say you can only go live with more than 1,000 followers. 0ur account had just four, but martha said it would work anyway. so, mohammed went to test it from the outskirts of a camp near idlib. let s buy some coins. yep. we bought $106 around £90, in tiktok coins. i m going to call mohammed and tell him to go live. yep.
mohammed recognised one of the camps in the videos. there are hundreds of camps in this part of syria. more than two million people live in them, forcibly displaced in syria s long running civil war. when mohammed got there, he immediately found families begging for gifts on tiktok live. mona s husband was killed in an airstrike. she now lives with her six daughters. sharifa is blind in one eye and has partial sight in the other. for the past month, they ve been going on tiktok live. it s tiring work, but they have limited options to earn a living in the camp and meet their basic needs.
over £1,000 would have been put in there and that to them would have been a lot of money. we ve uncovered a network of companies around the world, including agencies contracted by tiktok in china, all making money off these displaced families. earlier this year, tiktok users in the uk began to notice something different on the app. suddenly, their feeds were full of live videos of syrian families living in tents asking for help. this is the account i ve been using to follow some of these families in syria. and you can see here, all of these accounts are live right now. and actually, if you watch some of the videos, you can see there s a pattern. the children seem to be saying the same kind of things. they re asking for likes and gifts. and if you listen closely, sometimes you can hear there s a voice off camera actually