‘Project Rescue Children’ Exposed as Latest in Series of Human-Trafficking Hoaxes

Project Rescue Children (PRC) claims to have rescued hundreds of children around the world from human traffickers. But an intensive investigation by the BBC casts major doubts on this claim. Reporter Hayley Mortimer found that multiple PRC stories—including one involving a baby “saved from traffickers”—appear to have been false and that several of the rescue centers it was supposedly fundraising for didn’t exist.

PRC called the BBC’s allegations “completely without merit, misleading and defamatory.”

But the BBC’s story appears deeply reported, with Mortimer having physically traveled to alleged rescue centers in Kenya and The Gambia only to discover they didn’t exist.

PRC was founded by a former police officer named Adam Whittington, a British and Australian citizen. After leaving the police force, Whittington set up a company that helped locate kids taken abroad by their parents during custody disputes. The group later shifted focus, and it now describes its mission as rescuing and protecting children “from child trafficking and exploitation.”

The group raised funds—sometimes with the help of celebrities, such as British TV personality Sam Faiers—by telling supporters they were helping to save trafficked children and build rescue centers in Kenya, The Gambia, Uganda, and the Philippines. But less than half of the money recently raised for a rescue center in Uganda made it to group’s partner organization there, the BBC reports. And it gets worse: Alleged rescue centers elsewhere didn’t seem to exist at all.

Mortimer and a BBC team traveled to the outskirts of Kenya’s Kisumu to visit a PRC center “supposedly run by a woman known as Mama Jane.” They found that “Mama Jane was an elderly lady called Jane Gori, who lived in the house with her husband.” There were no kids there, “rescued or otherwise,” and Gori had no idea PRC was using pictures of her house in fundraising efforts. “I did find out that her son, Kupa Gori, was PRC’s director in Kenya and he had brought Mr Whittington to visit her home,” writes Mortimer. “Whittington uses pictures of improvement work PRC has funded at Mrs Gori’s house to convince donors he is running a rescue centre.”

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