Fact check: ‘Channel migrants' in prison and fake ‘Amazon' deals

Yahoo

4 days ago

This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK's largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Are 'Channel migrants' 24 times more likely to go to prison than British citizens?
New analysis from the Conservative Party last week claimed migrants who cross the Channel in small boats are 24 times more likely to go to prison than the average British citizen.
We've repeatedly asked the Conservatives about their research but haven't received a response, so we don't have full details of their calculations.
But based on the details reported, the claim that 'Channel migrants' are 24 times more likely to go to jail is not reliable. The University of Oxford's Migration Observatory says there is no reliable publicly available data on the proportion of small boat arrivals who go to prison.
The first report of the claim said the Conservative analysis is 'based on the 10,838 foreign criminals' in prison in England and Wales in March 2025.
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures do show that in March there were 10,838 'foreign nationals held in custody', a figure which excludes people who also held a British passport. (Some were awaiting trial or in prison for non-criminal reasons, so not all are necessarily 'criminals'.)
These figures only show the number of foreign nationals in prison at a given point in time though, so can't reliably tell us how likely it is for a foreign national to go to prison at some point during their time in this country.
The report went on to say that the March prison data suggests the rate of British citizens in jail is 0.14%, compared with 0.18% for foreign nationals, and that the rate is 'significantly higher for the nationalities who make up the largest small boat arrivals, including Somalians, Afghans, Iraqis, Albanians and Iranians'. It said the Conservative analysis suggests 'some 3.4% of small boat migrants could go to prison', and that this is 24 times the 0.14% British citizen imprisonment rate.
It is not clear from the story how exactly the 3.4% figure was calculated — we don't know for sure all the nationalities it covers, what proportion of small boat arrivals those nationalities account for and over what period, or how else the figures may have been adjusted.
The report did explain that imprisonment rates for specific nationalities were calculated by dividing the number of people of each nationality in custody in March by the number of people in England and Wales who held a passport from that country as of the 2021 Census (again excluding people with a British passport).
But this is not a reliable way to calculate the proportion of foreign nationals in prison in 2025, because it takes no account of how the population of different nationalities in England and Wales may have changed since 2021. In recent years there have been significant changes to migration patterns to the UK and a surge in small boat crossings.
The Migration Observatory told Full Fact: 'Getting accurate data on criminal conviction rates by nationality is very hard because the UK currently does not have accurate population data for each nationality.
'The migrant population has changed significantly since 2021… and more recent population estimates are highly uncertain due to data collection issues. Some groups of migrants are particularly likely to be undercounted, such as Albanians.'
What's more, the prison data used in the Conservative analysis appears to refer to all those of each nationality in custody, not specifically those who arrived via small boat.
Those counted are likely to include people who have migrated by a range of different routes—for example, some may have visas. And as the Home Office noted in its response to the analysis, these figures could also capture foreign nationals placed in custody while here temporarily (for example, while on holiday).
The analysis appears to assume small boat arrivals are jailed at the same rate as others of the same nationality who arrived by another route. But we don't know whether or not this is the case.
The Migration Observatory told us one reason for the variation in imprisonment rates between different nationalities was likely to be 'differences in socio-economic status among people arriving on different immigration routes'.
It said: 'For example, people from comfortable backgrounds with high levels of education and professional jobs are much less likely to go to prison, and this is likely to be true among migrants too (such as those arriving on work visas for skilled jobs). Age and sex also play a role: young men have higher offending rates.
'As a result, it would not be surprising if people arriving in the UK through different routes (eg, on work visas versus small boats) had different offending rates, though the data are currently not good enough to understand these trends properly.'
The Home Office said the comparison made in the analysis was 'completely unfounded', adding: 'It is inappropriate to apply foreign imprisonment rates to small boat arrival data as these consist of very different groups of people.'
The MoJ told us that it does not currently collate data that would identify how foreign nationals in custody arrived in the country, or their immigration status (beyond figures for the number issued with an immigration detention order). It noted though that the justice secretary has asked civil servants to review what more data can be published, and similar work is also being carried out at the Home Office.
Too-good-to-be-true 'Amazon' offers on Facebook
In the last year we've fact checked at least 10 examples of fake offers supposedly from Amazon circulating on social media, promising everything from iPads to Dyson vacuum cleaners at very low prices or even for free. We wrote about one such offer for £3 laptops earlier this week, ahead of Amazon's Prime Day promotion.
Amazon has repeatedly told us such Facebook posts, which often feature photos of piles of boxes in a warehouse with someone poorly edited into the picture beside them, are not genuine offers from the company. But we have sometimes seen them engaged with or commented on hundreds of times.
The posts often urge Facebook users to fill in surveys or follow a link to claim the supposed deal. These links may then lead to poor imitations of the real Amazon website, or an apparently unrelated web page. Sometimes the web pages ask people for their personal information and payment details.
This isn't a problem unique to Amazon – we see posts making similar false claims about other retailers too, such as Argos, Tesco and John Lewis.
Here are a few tips on how to spot this kind of fake offer:
– Always double-check posts sharing deals that seem too good to be true – if a post is promising a £3 Samsung TV or £1.78 PlayStation 5 console, it's probably not legitimate.
– Check whether an offer has been shared by a company's official page on social media, which will often have a high number of followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook or Instagram and a long post history.
– If you click a link, a different URL and page layout to the official website can be giveaways that something isn't quite right, as can grammatical errors in the text.