Time was, being recruited to undertake covert missions for a foreign power might involve a tap on the shoulder, a quiet meeting over weak Darjeeling and dry Battenberg in a dusty Cambridge tearoom. Now, though, potential recruits are as likely to be teenagers groomed on social media, chat platforms such as Telegram and Discord, or through online games themselves – before being given escalating missions in meatspace in exchange for clout and cash.
This has been most visible in Ukraine, where 21% of those arrested in 2025 for collaborating with Russia were teens. But it is a growing phenomenon worldwide – including in the UK, where, according to MI5’s annual threat update in October 2025, one in five of the 232 terrorism arrests in the preceding year were of children under 17.
Attacks on a warehouse in Leyton in March 2024 and a synagogue in Harrow in April this year were committed by young people in the pay of Russia and Iran respectively. Matt Jukes, deputy police commissioner at the Met, described the pattern of such attacks as
“thugs for hire… It looks like quick and easy money.” But how do they get hooked in?
One common technique is for initial contact to take place in existing chat communities where young people (in the main young men) congregate; Telegram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Discord are all commonly used. Operatives in the pay of state actors will work to befriend bored, disaffected or openly-avaricious kids through flirtation, sympathy, gamified mechanics – and, eventually, payment.
Small sums are paid out for small, initially trivial, tasks. One example cited by Ukrainian police involves teens starting out by putting up posters for a few quid, paid out in crypto, and graduating to photographing air defence systems outside Kharkiv. This was all under the guise of a seemingly innocuous “treasure hunt” style game designed to feed intelligence back to the Russian military, which in turn led to real-world airstrikes.
It’s not just state actors, either; Europol reports a rise in organised crime groups employing similar tactics, with over 14,000 accounts across various digital platforms posting these sorts of “job” listings. “The phenomenon is spreading like wildfire across Europe,” Andy Kraag of Europol told Dutch current affairs show Nieuwsuur.
An unnamed UK security official told the FT that in many instances those behind recent offences, including March’s arson attacks against Jewish ambulances in Golders Green, “appear to have initially self-recruited online using apps such as Facebook, Telegram and Snapchat before being allocated handlers, most likely in the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard] or ministry of intelligence and security”, and noted “near-identical recruitment patterns in both Israel and the UK”.
Recruits become what are increasingly referred to as “disposable” or “single-use” agents. Bored, nihilistic, broke teens find themselves playing for far higher stakes than they might imagine in exchange for fractions of crypto.
How can states work against this? At present, the Online Safety Act cites foreign interference as a “priority offence” for which platforms must assess content. But this is framed specifically in terms of mis- and disinformation, rather than recruitment ads attempting to persuade a 15-year-old from Edmonton to smash up a mosque. Major social platforms are expected to submit updated illegal-content risk assessment records to Ofcom by October 2026.
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Overall, though, stories like this are another important reminder that the distinction between online and offline is, in 2026, so porous as to be largely meaningless. Online is offline, in most senses, and what happens in the physical world is born of activity that begins in the digital – and we need to be aware of that in defence as in the rest of society.
As noted by Jonathan Hall, the UK’s independent reviewer of state threats legislation: “The internet is a portal into young people. It’s incredibly powerful. It provokes strong emotions and engagement and commitment, and you’ve got manipulative people in Silicon Valley and manipulative people sitting in Tehran and Moscow.”
“As a society, we’re beginning to understand the first category, but I don’t think we’ve started to think about the second category at all.”
