This is the moment a UK phone shop worker offered to take £3,000 in cash to pay a smuggler for a small boat crossing.
Criminal gangs are using high street shops to transfer money out of Britain to pay for illegal journeys.
Footage filmed at Afg Mobile Repair in Woolwich shows a man behind the counter speaking to a researcher posing as a family member of a migrant in France .
The shop worker tells the researcher he can take the money immediately and will return it if the crossing is not successful.
'If your people do not cross, if he tells me to return your money back to you, I'll do it,' he says.
'You can't count on boats, you never know, God forbid the boat sinks, and all of them [drown].'
Earlier, another undercover researcher, posing as a migrant trying to cross the Channel, had visited a migrant camp in Dunkirk.
Within minutes of arriving, two men approached offering to connect them with a people smuggler.
One of the men in the Woolwich phone shop describing how the arrangement worked
Another phone shop worker being confronted by a BBC reporter. He denied the shop moves money for smugglers
The footage was filmed at Afg Mobile Repair, pictured
One of the touts gave the researcher the name of a people smuggler called Ahmad, who said the crossing would cost £2,700 for two people.
He said the researcher could pay through three UK businesses, including the Woolwich phone shop.
The BBC did not hand over any cash to the worker at Afg Mobile Repair who - when approached later - denied moving money for smugglers.
'We don't move money… we have only phone shop,' he said.
The two other businesses named by the smuggler were a car wash in Cambridgeshire and a wholesaler in Newcastle.
Like the phone shop, both are listed on Companies House, the UK's register of businesses.
The smuggler provided their UK bank details and said they could both take electronic transfers for migrant crossings.
Tom Keatinge, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said the investigation suggested a 'brazen attitude' among gangs.
'It is a concern that... people feel sufficiently confident they can be out in the open,' he said.
An alleged people smuggler who offered to help arrange a Channel crossing
Migration minister Mike Tapp MP said there was 'a lot of investigative work that goes on behind the scenes', in part, looking at money transfers.
Meanwhile, the National Crime Agency deputy director Dan Cannatella-Barcroft said 'tackling the criminal networks behind people smuggling remains a top priority and the NCA is devoting more resources to it than ever'.
He added: 'We are in no doubt that we are making the UK a more difficult place for them to target and operate in.'
When confronted on the phone, Ahmad denied any involvement in people smuggling. The second smuggler, Zia, did not respond to repeated requests to comment.
The owner of the Newcastle wholesale business said they 'strongly reject any suggestion that we have knowingly or negligently enabled criminal activity' and promised to co-operate fully with authorities.
The Cambridgeshire car wash did not respond to our request for comment.
This month saw the arrival of the 200,000th Channel migrant since the start of the small boat crisis - equivalent to the population of a city the size of Norwich.
Anger has risen over the large numbers continuing to make the journey despite the Government agreeing to pay France £660 million over three years to help curb the crossings.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood agreed to give Emmanuel Macron's government a 'core package' of £500million – spread over the next three years - to continue funding anti-migrant operations by French police.
A further £160million will also be handed over to fund new tactics by the French including stopping dinghies once they are already in the water.
A previous three-year, £500million deal was agreed in 2023 by then Conservative PM Rishi Sunak and during the lifetime of the agreement more than 84,000 migrants reached Britain.
The National Crime Agency announced today that arrests offences linked to people smuggling have gone up by more than 55 per cent in a year.
The NCA was involved in 300 arrests both in the UK and overseas in the year to April 2026 – up from 190 the year before, new figures reveal.
The rise is said to follow an increase in resources with more officers working to focus only on organised immigration crime, the agency added.
Over the 2025 to 2026 period, some 59 people were convicted of organised immigration crime (OIC) offences in UK courts following NCA investigations.
This includes UK-based people smuggler Ahmed Ebid, who was jailed for 25 years in May last year after he exploited migrants as part of a £12 million illegal boat crossing operation.
Egyptian-born Ebid helped organise the movement of thousands migrants on boat crossings from North Africa into Europe.
Turkish national Adem Savas was also sentenced to 11 years in prison in January 2026 after an investigation involving the NCA and Belgian authorities.
Despite the successes, critics of Labour's 'smash the gangs' approach have long insisted small boat crossings will only stop if there is an effective deterrent for the migrants themselves.
One of Labour's first acts in office was to scrap the previous government's Rwanda asylum deal, which was intended to create a deterrent.
The Smuggling Business: Undercover will broadcast on BBC One in the London and South regions on Monday 18 May at 8:30pm and will be available on BBC iPlayer.