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A former police officer who claimed to be rescuing children from human traffickers lied to raise money for charity, a BBC investigation has found.
Project Rescue Children (PRC) founder Adam Whittington says he has helped more than 700 children in countries including Uganda, Kenya and Gambia.
But BBC’s File on 4 has revealed that some of these children have never been trafficked and that funds raised, sometimes with the help of celebrity donors, are not always reaching the children in need.
The PRC called our claims that we were not supporting children “completely unfounded, misleading and defamatory.”
Our investigation revealed that Whittington, a British-Australian, deceived donors in a variety of ways, including by collecting funds for a baby he had allegedly rescued from human traffickers, who in fact remained with her mother the whole time. The mother, who lives in poverty, said that neither she nor her daughter had ever received any money from China.
Whittington began working in child rescue after retiring from the Metropolitan police 20 years ago.
He founded a company that repatriated children overseas whose parents had taken them during custody battles, but later turned his attention to trafficked and abused children.
His and the PRC’s social media pages have attracted 1.5 million followers and celebrity support for their shocking and sometimes disturbing content.
Sam Faiers, who appears in ITV’s The Only Way is Essex, has become a PRC ambassador and visited Uganda in September last year to meet orphaned and impoverished children.
So she appealed to her millions of fans to donate, eventually raising £137,000 ($175,000) to cover the construction and initial running costs of the rescue centre.
This fundraiser was the first time I realized something was wrong.
A few weeks after Sam Faiers’ total was announced, allegations against the PRC began to emerge on social media, with former ambassadors and trustees alleging financial mismanagement and suggesting stories about the children had been fabricated.
Of the 58,000 pounds ($74,000) donors expected to spend on building and running the proposed rescue centre, less than half has been sent to PRC’s Ugandan partner organisation, Make a Child’s Smile.
Founder Alexander Sembatija, who apologised to donors, told the BBC he believed the remaining funds had been “eaten by Adam Whittington and the PRC”. Construction work had halted due to a lack of funds, he added.
Sam Faiers told the BBC he was “absolutely shocked” and “heartbroken” to learn that not all of the money had reached the children, and urged Mr Whittington to “do the right thing and get the remaining funds to those who desperately need it immediately”.
The PRC said the funds provided were sufficient to complete construction of the rescue centre, and told the BBC it had withdrawn from the project after Sembatiya refused to sign contracts and mismanaged funds.
The remaining funds were used to help other children in Uganda and the Philippines.
The charity claims to rescue children from trafficking and abuse, but File on 4 found that unsuspecting children are being used as props and there are no children in the rescue centres.
While efforts to set up a rescue centre in Uganda have failed, China claims to already be operating in other African countries, including Kenya.
Since 2020, Whittington has recounted detailed and harrowing stories of children he allegedly helped at PRC’s Kenya rescue centre, including siblings who watched their parents be brutally murdered by traffickers.
Within weeks of launching its sponsorship program, PRC announced that all 26 Kenyan children listed on its website had been sponsored.
The rescue centre was located in a remote area on the outskirts of Kisumu city and its presence was difficult to locate.
So in April 2024 I travelled with a BBC team, accompanied by police officers, to discover the property, believed to be run by a woman known as Mama Jane.
It turns out Mama Jane was an older woman named Jane Gori who lived in the house with her husband. None of the children, rescued or not, were ever found.
However, it emerged that her son, Kpa Gori, was the director of the PRC in Kenya and had brought Whittington back to her home.
Whittington uses photos of renovations funded by the PRC on Gori’s home to convince donors he is running a rescue center, and Gori said she had no idea her name, home or photo were being used by the PRC.
Nearby, I met a farmer named Joseph, whose two sons and a granddaughter were described on the PRC’s website as orphans, homeless and victims of trafficking and exploitation — none of which was true.
Joseph’s son Eugene died shortly after the photo was taken in 2020, but his photo remained online until at least February of this year, and people continued to support him, according to the PRC website.
Joseph said he never received any money from the PRC, adding: “It breaks my heart to think that someone would use photos of my children for money that we did not personally receive.”
When we reported our findings to PRC, we were told that they maintained that Jane Gori Home was a PRC rescue centre caring for children, and that all funds for the work carried out there were paid to the Australian Charity Commission, with whom PRC is registered.
They did not respond to our questions about the unauthorized use of Joseph’s family photos.
The next fraud case I uncovered began in 2022. Whittington claimed to have carried out a dramatic rescue mission, rescuing a newborn baby from the clutches of human traffickers in a busy market in The Gambia.
On the morning of Dec. 17, Whittington said his team pursued two men who had dropped the basket during their getaway. Inside the basket was a newborn baby, whom Whittington named Mireya. Whittington posted a photo of the baby wrapped in a gold blanket.
To lend credence to the story, he told his followers that he had adopted the baby and that he was being looked after at a PRC rescue centre in Gambia.
He told the same story to British director Alex Betts and asked him to join him in adopting a child.
Betts, an online influencer, wants to bring the baby back to the UK and an online fundraising campaign has been launched along with a sponsorship programme.
In March 2023, Betts visited the girl he thought was Mireya and took photos and videos of himself playing with the beautiful baby girl, which went viral online and was viewed by more than 40 million people.
After Mr Betts returned to Britain, Mr Whittington asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing him from saying anything publicly about China. Mr Betts didn’t understand why and expressed concern.
The PRC subsequently terminated her contract, citing that she was “exploiting children for profit on social media.” Betts no longer received photo or video updates of Mireya, and Whittington began attacking her online, falsely accusing her of being a drug addict and, again falsely, claiming that there was a warrant out for her arrest in The Gambia.
Betts says she was recruited by the PRC “to bring attention to the organization on social media.” She denies the allegations against her and says she has always acted “in good faith and with pure intentions.”
Betts Googled “Gambian newborns” and discovered the photo of the baby wrapped in a gold blanket was of another child, one that had been posted to the maternity ward’s social media page two years before Mireya was “rescued.”
PRC told us that a member of its staff had mistakenly used the image because they did not want Mireya’s identity to be revealed, and the PRC board has since publicly apologized for the confusion.
The BBC could not find any evidence that a market rescue had actually taken place, but Betts did see the baby. So who was the child?
We visited Gambia in May 2024, a year after Betts’ video went viral. Our first stop was a purported Chinese rescue center.
But just like what we found in Kenya, it was not a rescue center and the rescued children had never lived there – the owner of the property said it was just a family home.
His name is David Bass, the father of Ebou Bass, who was employed as PRC’s director in The Gambia. He told us that PRC had repaired the roof on his house and installed a fresh water supply. Whittington also posted images of this work on social media and on the PRC’s website to back up his claim that he was running a rescue centre.
Ms Bass said she was unaware that the renovations to her home were being paid for with funds raised to renovate the rescue centre.
We were told the baby, named Mireya, lived in a nearby village, and our search led us to a small hamlet where we found the toddler who looked immediately familiar from Betts’ video.
The child’s arms were covered in wounds from a bacterial skin infection because his mother could not afford the medicine he needed.
She said the baby was born and raised in the village and that she was approached by Eboo Basu when her daughter was three months old, who told her there was someone who wanted to sponsor the baby and gave Betts permission to take the baby.
She was surprised to hear the stories being told online about her daughter, who said she has never received any money but has been given groceries a few times.
Ebou Basu, the retired director of the Gambia PRC, admitted that Mireya’s story was a lie and that the rescue centre was a family home. When pressed, Basu said it had been Whittington’s idea to rescue babies from traffickers, but that the children used as props were very poor and he had only gone along with it in the hope of receiving financial assistance.
Lamin Fatty of the Child Protection League of the Gambia, who is currently working with Gambian authorities to investigate Whittington and the PRC, said several laws may have been broken in the case.
PRC maintains that Mireya’s story is true and says she was rescued by PRC in cooperation with Gambian authorities. PRC has asked the BBC to carry out a DNA test on the child we found. PRC claims that the Bass family home is a PRC rescue centre and that Mireya was not there because she was visiting relatives overseas.
Adam Whittington served in the Australian Army for at least five years before joining the Metropolitan Police in 2001.
It is not yet clear what became of the funds raised for the PRC or where they are being spent. Whittington has set up companies and charities in several countries, many of which do not provide detailed financial statements.
However, we know that some donations fell short of their goals.
The BBC has discovered that in 2022, the UK Charity Commission rejected PRC’s application for registration because it had not proven that it had solely charitable purposes and had not addressed what the commission described as “significant issues” with the application.
Whittington also has registered charities in Gambia, Kenya, Ukraine and the Philippines.
PRC was a registered charity in Australia until it reported its investigation to the Australian Charity Commission. Its charity status has now been revoked.
Adam Whittington currently lives in Russia. He did not respond to our requests for an interview.
Since we began our investigation, some content has been removed from the PRC website and Whittington has been banned from Instagram. He has instructed Kenyan lawyers to block the broadcast of our investigation but has not been successful. He has launched an online campaign against the BBC, calling me a “rogue journalist.”
His remaining social media accounts claim he is currently traveling back and forth between the Philippines, raising funds for rescue centres and rescuing children, and he says he plans to expand PRC to South Africa soon.
Additional reporting by Kate West, Katie Ring and Melanie Stewart-Smith
