Home Office officials are being hoodwinked by fraudulent asylum seekers who are falsely claiming to be from war-torn Eritrea, a Mail investigation can reveal.

In several video calls, seen by this newspaper, migrants brazenly boasted about how they obtained asylum in the UK by pretending to be persecuted by Eritrea’s authoritarian regime.

Instead, they come from Ethiopia, the neighbouring – and much safer – East African country.

MailOnline discovered a network of thousands sharing huge swathes of training material to convince case officers they are from Eritrea – because it has a 99 per cent success rate for asylum claims.

Despite being a country of just 3.6million, Eritreans have made up the fourth-largest group of asylum seekers in the UK in the last three years.

One Ethiopian migrant, Michaele Abraha, an Uber driver living in London, has racked up tens of thousands of views on TikTok where he brags of how he was given asylum in the UK by pretending to be Eritrean – and teaches others how to do the same. Read more