A nurse earning £36,000 a year has been secretly working as a 'full-service escort' on her days off in an attempt to solve her financial difficulties.

The woman, using the pseudonym Katie, turned to sex work after becoming saddled with debt from a former relationship and facing increased housing costs.

Katie, who has been a nurse for more than ten years, spoke to Channel 4 for its new Dispatches documentary 'Hunting the Debt Predators' which airs at 8pm tonight.

The programme looks at how the cost-of-living crisis is impacting the public as more people turn to illegal lenders and loan sharks charging extortionate interest rates.

Katie said: 'I was starting to panic, thinking "how am I going to sustain my mortgage, my outgoings"? Things had always been a little bit difficult, but not as they were this time.'

The nurse explained how her journey into sex work began when she spotted an advert on social media recruiting women to livestream sexual content.

Katie said: 'I was just thinking, I just need money. Then, a few months after that I had a bill for my car I couldn't pay. And then some guys would say "oh, do you escort?"

'Which got me onto like "maybe, well maybe I could just do one or two clients a week – then maybe that would help a little bit more". Since then it just kind of spiralled.'

For the past two years, Katie has been balancing full-time shifts as a nurse and secretly working as what she described as a 'full-service escort' on her days off.

She said: 'I remember the first day going to meet someone – I was so nervous, I just thought, "what am I doing"? But I just thought "I need to, I need to make money, I can't carry on surviving like this".'

Clients find Katie via her profile on a website. When she is not working as a nurse, she sees two or three people a day - normally meeting at their home or at a hotel.

Asked if she gets scared, she said: 'Yeah, always. As I'm about to knock on the door, I just think "Oh God, here we go again". That feeling for me has never gone away.

'Deep down, I do carry quite a lot of shame. I just think, "If anybody knew I was doing this". But I'm doing this for a reason. It's not something anybody has to know about.'

Responding to whether she wants to give it up, Katie added: 'Yeah, I would. I just feel like I'm working all the time, like being on a hamster wheel. It's relentless, and with the cost of everything going up. I don't know essentially when I could give this up.'

Reporter Ellie Flynn spoke to other people involved in exploitative and dangerous situations, uncovering a trend where more people are finding loan sharks via social media because their poor credit scores mean they cannot take out traditional loans.

Online sexual predators were found to be preying on women struggling to make ends meet and using debt as a form of coercion and control to elicit intimate pictures. 

One woman explained the responses she had after requesting loans online, saying: 'It was men asking for naked pictures or asking to send your underwear - it's awful.

'I was surprised by the volume of it that every single person who messaged me wanted the exact same thing under the same terms; they wanted to lend me the money and didn't want to be repaid, they wanted something in exchange for it.'

It comes as research by the Centre for Social Justice found more than two million Brits are in debt to illegal lenders - a rise of two-thirds over the past five years.

A separate study cited by the programme from Fair4AllFinance discovered a new trend that one in three people had found illegal lenders via social media.

Criminologist Nicola Harding told the documentary: 'They (illegal lenders) might ask for your data: your name, date of birth, where you live.

'Data is currency in the criminal world and allows criminals to open bank accounts and even companies in your name, which they can then use for illegal activities.

'The harms are complex and layered. You have normal, hardworking people, who are now indebted to criminals.'

'Dispatches - Hunting the Debt Predators' airs on Channel 4 at 8pm tonight