Bogus Websites, Staged Protests and Pretend Atheists: Inside the Fake Asylum Industry

From fake news websites to staged political protests and bogus medical conditions, asylum seekers and the advisers helping them are using an array of fabricated evidence to bolster their fake claims.

It all amounts to a sham industry, which includes charging migrants for advice on how to pose as gay to claim asylum, as exposed by the first part of our undercover investigation into the immigration system.

Other techniques include paying to write articles in atheist magazines and hiring someone to pretend to be a same-sex partner.

At an office off the busy Mile End Road, in east London, on a Tuesday evening in early April, our undercover reporter was receiving an instruction course in how to apply for asylum.

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There were three routes to asylum for someone in his situation: as someone who faced persecution for their sexual orientation, their religious beliefs or their political views.

Akhand said he would handle the legal side, but it was up to the undercover reporter to choose whether he wanted to pretend to be gay, an atheist or a political activist.

All of the options would take work. For a legal fee of £1,500, Akhand would help him in “preparing your application, preparing you for the interview, taking repeated mock interviews”.

But the reporter would also need to create evidence in order to convince the Home Office that he was not faking his claim.

Akhand said he knew people who could help with that and would introduce him “if you cannot find any other way”.

It would cost between £2,000 and £3,000 and the type of evidence needed would depend on which path he chose.

If the reporter wanted to declare himself an atheist, the process would start with making posts on social media insulting Islam or the Prophet Muhammad.

“Religious clerics will start making comments threatening to kill you. Then you will see that your evidence has been created,” Akhand said.

He would be introduced by the lawyer to atheist organisations in the UK and in Bangladesh that ran online blogs or magazines where, for a fee, he could make posts, again lending credibility to his claims. He suggested the reporter could use AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to write blog or article posts.

He would also need to attend events organised by groups for former Muslims and speak out during them because “this is not the age of posts anymore, it is the age of live videos”.

Akhand suggested a possible story to tell the Home Office.

“You would say that you became an atheist after coming here. You were not one in Bangladesh,” he said.

He later suggested “you could have written under a pseudonym if you were in Bangladesh”.

Akhand said there is “no way to know who is an atheist and who is not…You just told me that you are not an atheist, which means you are not an atheist. But there is no system to check these things.”

The political route was difficult, Akhand said, requiring a legal case to be made against the applicant in their home country.

Much easier, he said, was pretending to be gay “because they will not dig too much into your past story”.

“For gay cases, it’s private, but politics and atheism are public,” he said.

“So establishing that is a bit difficult.”

He said he could “connect you with people we know who do these things”.

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Akhand is far from the only adviser out there who is willing to help bring fake claims.

We’ve uncovered a string of fake asylum applications that were brought with the help of a different Bangladeshi lawyer between 2018 and 2021. Some, and seemingly many, of these claims succeeded.

The claims were generally made on the basis that the applicants were both atheists and also gay or bisexual.

The evidence submitted by the applicants includes online articles posted on what purported to be genuine news websites.

In fact, internet records show the network of websites were set up by someone connected to the group.

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