Men covertly filming women at night and profiting from footage, BBC finds

The industry of covertly filming women on nights out could be making “revenues in the multi-million pound range”, says Prof Annabelle Gawer, director of the Centre of Digital Economy at the University of Surrey.

“We’re talking about billions of cumulative views across this whole ecosystem,” she says, adding that a video with a million views could make up to £5,000.

Under UK law, filming in public places is rarely illegal, but for many of the women we spoke to, the fact that these videos made money for the creators has left them feeling angry and frustrated.

The law around this sort of content is in a “grey area”, says Honza Cervenka, a solicitor with McAllister Olivarius specialising in image-based sexual abuse.

“It skirts between the line for a number of different crimes, including voyeurism and harassment, which is what has given it the space to grow and grow,” he says.

For the crime of harassment, there needs to be a “course of conduct” of two or more harassing incidents, which can include “harassing on the street and then online harassment, so posting the video or sharing it”, Cervenka says.

Posting a video, then using a woman’s image as a thumbnail on other videos, could amount to harassment, he adds.

YouTube has deactivated two accounts linked to Florjan Reka after we contacted the company with the findings of our investigation. In a post on X, Florjan Reka asked YouTube for the decision to be reviewed, saying he only publishes “public walking tour videos”.

Several of the videos we shared with YouTube remain online. The video-sharing platform says it “rigorously enforces” its community guidelines. It added that, at the end of 2025, it removed 1.8 million videos for violating its harassment policies.

The other accounts we linked to individual men remain online. One man appears to have renamed his channel, another has removed all his content.

TikTok has removed four channels we shared with them.

The channels we sent to Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, remain active. The company told us it has removed content that violated its policies.

The video of Grace and Sophie is one of the many that has been removed.

The sisters say it is a small victory for them, but Grace is unsure if it will make a difference.

“He’s got the video of me on his phone or his computer. What’s to stop him from sharing it again?” she says.

“There’s probably no shutting it down.”