Head of ‘Britain’s FBI’ issues chilling new warning to parents

The head of the UK's National Crime Agency has warned that children are not safe when they use the internet.

Addressing parents in a blistering new takedown of online platforms, Graeme Biggar, National Crime Agency (NCA) boss, warned of an increase in instances of child abuse taking place on social media and gaming websites.

"We would prefer children to be able to participate online safely and reap the benefits it provides. At the moment, they cannot," Biggar said in a statement issued to MailOnline.

"The online environment in its current form is not safe for children."

Biggar - who heads up the UK's equivalent to the FBI - went on to state that 'two generations of teenagers' have already been 'failed' by unregulated access to social media sites without 'any form of safety net'.

Britain's NCA has issued a chilling warning about children's access to social media (Getty Stock Images)

"The longer we wait, the slower we go, the more children we fail," he added.

Sites populated with children and teenagers targeted by predators

Biggar's damning comments follow a report which revealed as many as 900 cases of suspected child abuse are flagged to the agency every day.

According to NCA statistics, the agency receives around 75 reports of child-abuse images each day from Instagram and 100 from Snapchat. Both Google and X send an average of 25 reports a day.

Meanwhile, Biggar notes a surge of child abuse reports from gaming sites aimed at children. This includes platforms such as Roblox, a platform designed for children to game but that includes web chat features, with the agency receiving 25 reports a day.

Discord, another messaging app which was originally designed for gaming, receives around 50 reports a day.

Explaining why he decided to release the statistics to the public, Biggar said that he hoped it would be a turning point in attitudes to young people on the internet.

Graeme Biggar, National Crime Agency (NCA) boss, said that as many as 900 cases of child abuse were being reported each day (Getty Stock Images)

"We assess there are between 710,000 and 840,000 adults in the UK who pose some degree of sexual risk to children," he said. "Last year we received 92,000 reports of potential child abuse activity online from tech companies – a fourfold increase in the last seven years.

"And it continues to grow. Last month we received over 12,000. That is over 400 a day. Every day."

For example, there were around 840 weekly reports of abuse in 2022, this has now increased to an average of 400 a day, with some days seeing the NCA receive as many reports as 900.

Biggar also revealed that of the referrals received, they were not only increasing in number but also in severity.

"These are big numbers, but behind each one is an individual child," he added.

NCA does not want to ban under-16s' access to the internet outright

In previous guidance published by the NCA, the agency outlined that it does not expect to see a blanket ban for children on the internet but instead 'restrictions based on the specific features that create risk'.

"The longer we wait, the slower we go, the more children we fail," Biggar said (Getty Stock Images)

This includes private and encrypted messaging, weak age verification, allowing adults 'unrestricted' access to children, and harmful recommendations via a platform's algorithm.

"We need to call out the scale of the problem here. We need to be collectively horrified by it and we need as a society to address it," Biggar added.

"We will absolutely do our part in law enforcement, but we have to raise the alarm on the scale of this happening."

Responding to the allegations in a statement to LADbible, a spokesperson for Meta said: "Child exploitation is a horrific crime and we work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms. We use sophisticated technology to proactively identify child exploitation content, and in 2025, we removed over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram, over 94% of which we found proactively before it was reported to us. We report apparent instances of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC in line with our legal obligations, and continue to report more than any of our peers, thanks to our ongoing investment in detection."

"Our safety systems combine advanced technology and human-led investigations, alongside user reports to help identify accounts or spaces engaged in harmful activity," added a spokesperson for Discord told MailOnline.

LADbible Group has approached Discord, Roblox and Snapchat for comment.