London Centric’s investigation into the TikToker secretly filming fake anti-immigrant videos inside Londoners’ homes generated a huge public response.

Amid the hundreds of comments two major questions remained: Who was the individual behind the TikTok account and what motivated them to make the videos?

Today, we have an extraordinary confession from someone purporting to be the TikToker in question. They are just one person in a sea of online hate content. But their explanation of their actions helps shed light on the motivations behind a wider online trend.

London is being used as the backdrop for inaccurate viral videos that reach enormous audiences around the world by playing into the worst stereotypes about the capital.

See that story – and what Sadiq Khan has to say about our reporting – below.

Read to the end for Taylor Swift’s visit to a forthcoming Croydon mixed-used redevelopment, the growing number of freemasons in the Met police, and what we missed about Jeffrey Epstein’s London.

“I just wanted the clicks”: What really motivates the people spreading online lies about London?

By Katherine Denkinson and Jim Waterson

The man on the recording is baffled. He can’t understand how London Centric traced his anonymous hate-filled London TikTok account back to his employer by geolocating the wheelie bins in his videos.

“I thought no one’s gonna notice that,” he says. “Why would someone?”

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.

“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.

That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”

At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”

The result was the account Reform_UK_2025, which co-opted the logo and name of Nigel Farage’s political movement without permission from the party. It posted video tours of Londoners’ homes accompanied by an AI-generated voice claiming properties in Knightsbridge and Chelsea had been handed over to illegal