A long-running hoax claiming people are posing as “Home Affairs Officers” in order to rob houses in the UK has re-emerged on social media.
We’ve seen several posts sharing identical or very similar text saying: “Please be aware that there is a group of people going door to door pretending to be Home Affairs Officers. They have documents and letterheads from the Home Affairs Department and claim that they need to verify that everyone has a valid ID for the upcoming census. They rob houses. They are everywhere and they look neat.”
Not all of the posts give a specific location for where this is supposedly happening, but we’ve seen one post which claims this appears to have happened in the Surrey Heath area, as well as another shared to a local Facebook group for residents in Bolton-upon-Dearne in South Yorkshire.
South Yorkshire Police told us it wasn’t aware of any reports matching the details in that post. We’ve contacted Surrey Police to ask if it has received legitimate reports of any such incidents and will update this article if we receive a response. However, these posts appear to be versions of a hoax we’ve written about before, and there’s no evidence this is actually happening in the UK. We could find no verified reports of similar incidents happening in this country.
Join 74,000 newsletter subscribers who trust us to check the facts
Sign up to get weekly updates on politics, immigration, health and more.
Subscribe to weekly email newsletters from Full Fact for updates on politics, immigration, health and more.
Our fact checks are free to read but not to produce, so you will also get occasional emails about fundraising
and other ways you can help. You can unsubscribe at any time. For more information about how we use your data
see our Privacy Policy.
The same claim has also been posted by a Police Community Support Officer in the Waltham Forest area through Met Engage—an email messaging service provided by the Metropolitan Police which it says gives local residents “alerts about local crime, incidents and appeals” and “warnings about scams and frauds [sic]”.
When we contacted the Metropolitan Police to ask about the post in question, it told us it was unable to respond to media enquiries about posts shared through Met Engage due to the volume of content on the platform.
The UK does not have a government department called the “Home Affairs Department”. The most recent census was held in 2021, and the next census is not due to take place in England and Wales until 2031 (though a sample of people in six local authorities will be asked to participate in a test Census next year).
Versions of this claim have been circulating since at least 2016, and have been debunked by outlets in India, the US and Bermuda, as well as by local authorities in Malaysia and Singapore.
One of the posts includes an image of a document with the logo of the South African government. Fact checkers in South Africa have also written about these claims in the past, noting that genuine incidents of scammers impersonating Statistics South Africa officers were reported in 2021.
