Who's secretly filming fake TikToks inside Londoners' homes?

We tracked down the viral video account entering people's houses to spread false claims about immigrants.

The TikTok account was simple, addictive and — for many people — enraging.

Under the username Reform_UK_2025, it offered video tours of newly refurbished houses across London, describing how they had just been handed over, for free, to illegal immigrants.

One video claimed a house had been fitted with en-suite bathrooms for the benefit of “boat people”. Another told viewers that a tenant had been accused of rape, while others said properties had been reserved for Muslims. One video showed a group of black men inside a west London property and captioned the clip: “housing them so veterans can sleep in their garden”.

In one clip a “Palestinian asylum seeker” was said to have accepted the keys to the property while proclaiming his hatred of Britain. Another spoofed an advert for Jet2 Holidays by offering immigrants the chance to be picked up “from the Channel” and have their accommodation paid for by British taxpayers.

Typical claims on the videos filmed by the Reform_UK_2025 TikTok account

Hundreds of thousands of people viewed the clips. The comments were flooded with Britons expressing their fury that the UK government was handing out these expensive London properties to “illegal immigrants” for free, at a time when many other people are struggling to afford a place to live in the capital.

It was all lies.

The TikTok videos were part of a bizarre online stunt designed to anger the public that London Centric has linked back to one business — the same estate agency that was letting out the properties.

Typical comments on the videos posted by the Reform_UK_2025 TikTok account

The individual uploading the clips went out of their way to hide their identity. But there were clues that all was not as it seemed.

The person behind the camera could be seen opening many of the properties with a set of keys and letting other people in. Other clips, supposedly showing “illegal immigrants” being given houses in Knightsbridge, were filmed in semi-detached houses that are more common in suburbia than central London.

Following months of detective work we located the individual properties in the videos. First, we identified the design of the rubbish bins visible in some of the TikToks, which confirmed which council area the video had been filmed in. We then cross-referenced the bin identification with the front door numbers in some of the clips. Finally, we manually searched every road in the relevant London borough until we found a house that matched, before sending reporters to knock on the doors.

Today, London Centric can reveal:

• Rather than being given to “illegal immigrants”, the properties on the viral anti-migrant TikTok account are privately let to a mixture of Britons and people who legally live in the UK.

• The people living in the properties said they felt their private space had been violated when London Centric showed them how footage of their homes and belongings had been used to create online race hate content.

• The common thread between the properties is that they had all been let out by the same London estate agent.

This is a story that shows the ease with which fake stories about the capital can go viral, the damage that an individual can cause with a single TikTok account, and the enormous effort it takes to prove falsehoods.

And what happened when we confronted the estate agent only made the story stranger.

Keep reading to find out what happened.

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Today’s story took our team months of work to report and cost thousands of pounds. London Centric is a small start-up with no outside investors. Every subscription makes a massive difference to our ability to investigate stories about what’s really going on in London.

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