Snaptrap is your child safe . Social media has crept into our lives. It connects us to our friends and helps us make new ones but it has a hidden, dark side. I didnt want to be the one that would land in trouble for something that id been forced to do. I could have ended up dead. Gangs are taking advantage of social media to manipulate and control children. They were just scared kids. Theyd been sold down the river on a promise of something that isnt real. As the police try to crack down on these gangs on the ground, we investigate how they target and entrap children online. Ive gone undercover on snapchat as this 15 Year Old Girl. I cant believe theyre already trying to sell me drugs. I had a pretty average childhood. But. I had very severe anxiety, low mood, depression. I fell out with people in my own year within the school. It was probably, like, the loneliest id everfelt in my life. I really didnt have anyone to turn to at that point. I couldnt even turn to my own family. I just felt very trapped. I definitely knew that there was one reason and one reason only why i was there. That is a girls place in a gang, from a drug dealers Point Of View for sex. The darkest moments of annas life when she was just a teenager. Anna ended up in that dark place after she was exploited and controlled by a drugs gang. Shes one of many children who are groomed by those gangs on social media. I want to find out how thats allowed to happen online. The thing is, these gangs are sophisticated and dangerous. They dont want people like me knowing what theyre up to. They create such a Culture Of Fear that most people, like anna, are too scared to speak out but shes agreed to tell me her story. For her, it started with a Friend Request on snapchat from a young man shed met on a night out. Id given him my social media. And then hed be quite romantic, quite flirty and just showing a massive interest in me. How often were you getting these messages from him . Wed message 21w. So your phone would just be going nonstop . Yeah, pretty much, yeah. The constant messaging and attention made anna think she was getting into a relationship, but he had other ideas. Where anna saw a man not much older than herself taking an interest in her, he was actually working for an Eastern European drugs gang and saw anna as young, vulnerable and ripe for exploitation. Soon, he was asking her to help the gang. It was a bit scary at first, but i kind of realised that i didnt look like your typical drug dealer, so i could get away with it a bit easier. Anna felt like she was doing a favourfor someone who cared about her. The constant messaging on snapchat made herfeel special, until she started to realise she was being used. I thought that this person was my boyfriend and. I would see messages from other girls or him messaging other girls. It was quite heartbreaking, really, because he was the only person i had, really, to turn to. Do you think hed kind of built this sense that you depended on him through social media . Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Anna didnt realise it at the time, but what shes describing is grooming. Thats how the gang entered her life and theyre about to change it forever. This wouldnt have happened if i wasnt connected to him on social media in the first place. If i had not given him my social media, then half the stuff would never have happened. Ever since speaking to anna, ive been thinking a lot about this. Every teenager has one, and im starting to understand that, for gangs, thats an easy way to exploit children. Ive decided to build a fake profile for a 15 Year Old Girl who im calling mia. Look, here she is. Im not going to look specifically for drugs with this account. Im just following things that a real teenager might be interested in, like music and funny videos. But within a few minutes, im amazed at what i see. Im looking at this page with videos of cars and bikes, and up pops a link to another app. Its called telegram. I click on the link and it takes me to a page selling me all sorts of drugs, from ketamine to cocaine. Im actually quite surprised. I really didnt think that id be exposed to this stuff so quickly. Im going to an area of cardiff near the city centre. Ive been told that a lot of drug dealing goes on here. Ive got the same phone with the same fake account, and i want to have a look at that app that popped up earlier telegram. Telegram has this feature where you can look at the people in your area in real time and, look, allaround me, there are people selling drugs. Theres a guy on here selling mdma, ketamine, meth, even heroin and hes only 400 metres away. Theyre not even trying to hide their accounts. This stuff is really easy to find and if youre a child with a phone, i think you could stumble across it without even meaning to. I want to understand why these gangs put so much time and effort into reaching children online. Why would they recruit kids to do their dirty work . I need to talk to someone whos been on the inside and seen how these gangs work. Ive been given this guys details from a contact who met him when they were in prison together. Toms agreed to meet me and tell me what its like working for drugs gangs. Hes going to show me around roath in cardiff. Thats where he used to operate. Hes asked us not to show his face in case the gangs he was involved with come after him. First house down here, there was a flat in there. There was one right next to the lane by here. Wheres the lane . Theres the lane there. So, you had a flat trap house there, trap house there, and a trap house right in the end house by here. What is a trap house . So, youve got a flat built for one person with, like, three or four people in it, with the sole purpose of selling drugs. Forthe insider, it would bejust. Like, youd have your two, like, shotters, like, the people who are selling drugs, like, you know, youd have the person who lives there. Then youd have your regular punters who would come in, buy drugs, use the drugs there. This area is just full of drugs. Areas around the city centre are full of gangs, not from this city, operating, selling drugs from cars, from flats. What toms talking about here is a system called county lines, where gangs from bigger cities like london and birmingham start selling their drugs in smaller places like cardiff. Thats how he entered this world. In return for free drugs, he helped the gangs establish themselves on his home turf. Ive rented them a car, ive found them somewhere to stay. Its all going good. Im driving them across the city, like Dropping Bits and bobs off to different people. Its all going cool. I dont have to pay for drugs. I dont have to pay for a thing, to be honest, like. They treat me like royalty. Thats how it starts. That was like the honeymoon period. For a few years, this was toms life, and it was a deal that worked for him. But then the stakes got higher, and the people he was being asked to drive around got younger. At the start, they were like 21, 20, and that got down to, like, 17, 16. You know, some of them are borderline 16, and youre thinking, you know, theres no way youre the age youre telling me. If you were picking them up, werent you part of the problem . I was in the problem, i wasnt. Iwas. I was in fear of my life the whole time. Speaking to tom, i can start to understand how these gangs use fear to control and manipulate people. Thats what happened to anna, too. By now, the gang was plying her with drugs, but that came at a cost. We would just drive around and theyd be drug dealing and wed just be listening to loud music. They had a boot full of drugs. They would just say, just put your hand in the bag and take whatever you want out. Anna believed she was being given the drugs for free, but that wasnt the case. They sort of gave me an ultimatum of you now owe us a debt for all these free drugs that youve used. So, now you have two choices. You can either help us drug deal and earn the money back for us or you can do sexual favours. Anna was trapped by a debt shed never be able to pay off. The gang now wanted more from her. Even though she was just a child, they were asking her to get involved in riskier drug deals. So, she had a terrible choice to make. I chose the option that i thought was going to land me in the least trouble with the police and stuff. Which option was that . The sexual favours. Whats going through your head . Just panic, really, because i didnt feel like i was in control of the situation at all, and i didnt really know what they were capable of. Id just turned 14 and left year eight in school. I was on the cusp of, you know, doing some stuff i shouldnt have been doing. At a young age, kieron started to get pulled into the wrong crowd. And then my mum wanted to move back to be closer to her family, so my whole familyjust upped and left. In birmingham, it was all live, in person. If you were going to be groomed into a gang, it would be. You would be approached, you would have to be approached. There was no other way they could contact you. When i moved to newport, the whole gang culture and county lines and drug dealing thing, it wasnt at the forefront. That was more than a decade ago, but now social media has given gangs easier access to children. Well, theyve got an Endless Supply of vulnerable young people that they can tap into. If youve got a certain amount of people that follow you on any social media site, you can literally post, who wants to work . Who wants to earn some money . , and youll have a lot of vulnerable people. Before you know it, theyre right into the criminal world straight away. Now, kieron hears first hand what children are experiencing through the crimestoppers helpline. Theyre just worried. A lot of young people are scared of this county lines thing because it is happening around them. Its happening right in front of us and youve only got to go on social media and youll see it. That isntjust boys this is happening to its also happening to young girls as well, at quite a frightening rate. Its young girls who will think theyre in a relationship with someone thats genuine, send them explicit pictures and before you know it, them same pictures, they can quickly be turned around and used against them to make them do things that they shouldnt and dont want to be doing holding drugs for their boyfriend, or holding a weapon, something that can get them in a lot of trouble and possibly end them in prison, or worse off than prison. When tom was working for gangs, he came face to face with the impact of this grooming. They were just scared kids, you know . Theyve been sold down the river on the promise of something that isnt real. There was a girl in particular, er. She came down, she was playing the part of being in a gang, she was feisty, and. Tiny little thing. Big smile. But that smile, that smile just faded over time. That smile was gone. She always looked like she was going to start crying at any second, you know . And i get it, i understand it, like, you know, i get that. I get that fear. And what was she doing here . Why was she here . Her mum owed a few grand, out. Wherever they were from, and to pay that debt, there you go, take her. How do you feel about the fact that you were part of that system . Horrible. Dirty. Sorry. Guilty. Ashamed. That teenage girl had been sold a lie. Thats the grim reality of how this grooming works. Im back on the same fake account that i set up for a 15 Year Old Girl who were calling mia. Its been running for about two weeks now. Soon after i set her up, snapchat starts suggesting people that i might want to become friends with. Some of those people appear to be drug dealers. One of those suggested friends seems to claim hes part of a gang transporting drugs from london to swansea. Remember, this app thinks im a 15 Year Old Girl, and yet its encouraging me to befriend potential criminals. Its one thing to be offered drugs, but i know gangs are using these apps to groom children. The problem is theyre on the lookout for fake accounts like mine. Theyve tried to check me out. They want to see a picture of me. Obviously, i cant do that without blowing my cover. Thats as far as i can go. If i had sent them a picture and they trusted me, the next stage might have been a gang trying to recruit me. The police have shown me some evidence of what that can look like. 0ne post says. Hmu thats hit me up if youre trying to get trapgiddy. That means work in a trap house. Spots there, racks ie, money to be made. And this one just uses an emoji of a house, to show the trap house, and a picture of bread to tell you that theres money to be made. These are real posts by gangs trying to reach children. It can happen really quickly. Ive spoke to young people who its happened to and they tell me, i dont know how it happened. One minute, i wasjust engaging with a page on a certain, on a website, and then i was being asked to dojobs, and then they were telling me i owed them money, and i couldnt get out of this trap. So, as sad as it is, young people have died. Ive known young people who have been caught up in that lifestyle that have passed away. Its all exploitation and youre taking all the risk. Thats why the police are trying to crack down on these drugs gangs. In swansea, covert officers are on their way to shut down a county line. Ready, keith. In a joint operation by the met and south wales police. Police inside, a man suspected of running the line, which supplies crack and heroin. Time now is 08 52. Youre under arrest. For what . On suspicion of supplying class a drugs. Class a drugs . 0k . They find thousands of pounds concealed in his Kitchen Units and a mobile phone. Is that your phone . Yeah, thats mine. They also raid a suspected accomplice� s house and retrieve what looks like drugs that have been flushed down the toilet. Its a decent amount of heroin, by the looks of it. Yeah . Yeah. We believe that he is controlling the sale of drugs from that mobile phone and using other people within the city to distribute those drugs. The suspect in this case was an adult, but often the Police Find Children when they carry out these raids. That may be children who are holding drugs on behalf of adult drug dealers. So those children may feel that theyre part of a county line, or theyve been forced into it, or they may not understand that theyve been groomed to an extent. But we will look for those factors and those indicators, and we will treat exploited children as victims. And we will not treat them as criminals where there is evidence that they are being exploited. I can tell from talking to the police that theyre trying to change their approach to children caught up in county lines, but i know that anna never had the opportunity to be treated as a victim. As time went on, the gangs abuse intensified, and one night, she was duped into going to a house where members of the gang were waiting for her. They held me against my will and i was sexually assaulted. By more than one person, and they wouldnt allow me to go home. And these are grown men . Yeah. So they were members of the gang. Did you know them . I didnt know any of them, and none of them spoke english. Ijust remember leaving and just feeling really disgusted in myself, just thinking that it was my fault that i ended up in that situation. Throughout this period, did you ever think about going to the police . No. That was never an option for me. Why is that . I didnt trust them. You know, you hear about these stories where girls turn to the police and they end up in a worse situation than what they were in the first place, and. Also, with the thought of me drug dealing, basically, i didnt want to be the one that would land in trouble for something that i was being forced to do. Anna told me she didnt want to talk to the police, even when she thought her life was in danger. Ive heard this time and time again, children fearing reprisals if they end up giving evidence against gang members. I think our response has got a lot more sophisticated, so we would look to build an investigation where were able to present that evidence to the Court Without the need of having to put a child who is unwilling to give evidence or unable to support that investigation. I wonder if this could have helped anna. It might have put her abusers behind bars and helped her move on. Even if you arent in court yourself, there will still be details thatll be discussed that would be identifiable, that it is you and that its come from you. And, inevitably, that drug dealer leaves prison, if he does get prosecuted. All the rest of the gang on the outside hear about it. What happens in this world if you do snitch . You can have a target on your head for the rest of your life. Anna found her own way to escape the gangs clutches, but she could never be sure that she was completely safe. I slowly started avoiding them as much as i could, and then it wasnt until sort of a few months of that, maybe, where ijust got the courage to just block and delete. So you kind of went underground on social media . Yeah, yeah. I had to. How long did it take to stop looking over your shoulder all the time . I dont think it ever does stop. Anna got out of being exploited by the gang in the same way she got in social media. Talking to her, it feels like thats the key to stopping this from happening to others, and its Companies Like snapchat that have that power. Snapchat told me theres no place on its platform for the exploitation of any member of its community, or the illegal buying and selling of drugs. It says its working to protect younger children from people they dont know, and it has a Team Collaborating with police and experts to understand drug related trends. Both snapchat and telegram say their moderators proactively monitor content to keep people safe, as well as allowing users to report harmful material. Whether they intend to or not, social Media Companies have created a space where gangs can exploit and control people people like anna and tom and once theyre in, its hard to get out. Years of working for gangs took its toll on tom, but he did eventually escape. My life is turned around so much, like, you dont even know. Im doing things in my community, for my community, and i never, ever thought id be doing that. And i love that. In the end, it was a knock on the door that changed things for tom. When i seen police, it was just relief. When my house was raided, i thought i was getting shot, or murdered. Many a time, i thought i was going to die. When the police come in my door, i just knew that was my way out. Toms finally had the chance to rebuild his life after prison. For anna, that process has been hard, especially because she knows the gang that abused her is still out there. Nothings been done about them. Its just such a horrible feeling to know that there are other people who are going through that, and worse. Despite everything that happened to her, annas managed to move