“There’s strong evidence, obviously, that Chinese organised crime is strongly linked to the Chinese government,” says David Wilson. “I think it’s really difficult to untangle exactly how it’s linked.”
This is one conclusion reached by the author of a UK government report, declassified in February of this year, on the connections. Another is that agents of the CCP repeatedly tried to get him to soften what his analysis was destined to be as he was researching the report. These influence agents included a Chinese national and naturalized British citizen who is also a former British police officer (The Guardian, June 7, 2026).
Wilson said he had been warned during early interviews with former officers in the Hong Kong police force that he would make himself a target for “honey traps or bribes” from the Chinese state and organised crime.
“Within about two weeks of getting this warning, I receive this phone call,” Wilson said. “It was someone who I loosely knew. It was an ex-Chinese citizen who was a naturalised British citizen.
“He had been part of a British law enforcement institution. He said: ‘Listen, why don’t you meet me at this specific Chinese restaurant?’ Straight away, as soon as he said that, I knew the restaurant, I knew who owned it, and I knew where this was going, because I’d been warned about it, and it was literally word for word.”…
Wilson, a former police inspector who is the West Midlands regional coordinator for the national Organised Immigration Crime Domestic Taskforce, said he was also targeted through his LinkedIn account as he carried out his research.
He said he had “around 20 to 25 connection requests” from women with “nothing on their profile at all, wanting to contact me—some of them clearly false personas”.
“There’s nothing on the profile. They haven’t posted anything, there was no detail. It was just a photograph of a very, very beautiful woman. Before I started, I’d been on LinkedIn for 10 years. No one ever contacted me,” Wilson said.
That LinkedIn is littered with CCP spies is confirmed by other investigations, including a report by the so-called Five Eyes powers (the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) “highlighting an ‘aggressive’ online recruitment strategy where spies for Beijing military intelligence pose as workers acting on behalf of private businesses or think tanks.”
Another person who contacted Wilson, a self-described businessman, told Wilson that he had “ties to the Chinese government, very close ties, and I have people who can really help you with this.”
According to Wilson, this fellow was “really persistent. ‘The Chinese are such wonderful people. They’re so generous. Look at all these links that I’m sending you about the good work that they’ve done.’ I said my loyalty is to the [UK] government and to the UK, not the Chinese government. In the end, I said: ‘Listen, I’ve reported your profile to the appropriate authorities. You need to stop contacting me now.’ ”
Also see:
UK-China Transparency: “Study exposes Chinese organised crime threat in the UK, state links, and student involvement” (May 5, 2026)
“Police officer David Wilson’s PhD thesis was based on interviews with 25 investigators, analysis of police data, and a survey of more than 900 Chinese students.” Chinese organized crime groups (COCGs) in the UK “often deploy ‘polycriminal’ business models, involving activity across multiple crime types. This may mean overlapping involvement in sexual exploitation, money laundering, drug importation, fraud, underground banking, and other activities, often using one area of offending to facilitate or conceal another…. The report states that there are links between COCGs and the Chinese state. It claims that COCGs have historically possessed political dimensions and that, in the modern period, elements have been incorporated into the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front work.”
