Albania’s most popular online celebrity, Kozak Braci, gained a huge following on social media while endorsing UK criminality and promoting ways to illegally travel to Britain, the Express can reveal.

Braci, who has over a million fans on TikTok and Instagram, regularly gave his online followers tours of cannabis farms in Britain as he grew his audience.

In these videos, obtained by the Express, Braci discusses at great length how drug workers for criminal gangs can supposedly make £5,000 to £6,000 per month. “It’s great to stay in the cannabis house. I can live there without a problem,” he tells viewers in one clip.

In another video Braci presses a people smuggling expert, who has just explained how Albanian migrants can use a Spanish airport to travel to Britain illegally, for details about hiding in a lorry.

“You know there are a lot of brothers and sisters in hardship. Can you show how to go there unnoticed, without being detected? How do they do it?” he asks the man.

We showed Braci’s videos to ex-Metropolitan Police officer turned consultant Graham Wettone who described them as “glorifying the production of drugs in the UK to people from outside [Britain], enticing people to come and make a lot of money”.

“From a policing or law enforcement perspective, it just shows you the type of problem that we have,” he added.

Multiple young Albanian people have told the Express that the impact Braci, who is known in Albania as the ‘King of Instagram’, has on teenagers is massive. Danila Buci, a 21-year-old student from Tirana, said she had seen young men copying his behaviour for years.

“My sister is just 16 years old and she is seeing people [like Braci] that are doing these ‘mafia things’, doing drugs or explaining how they’ve done it. This is their type of influence.”

We tracked down Braci to a Communist-era housing block in Tirana where he still lives to ask him why he’d made these videos promoting a criminal lifestyle in Britain.

He claimed the cannabis farm tours were unplanned and that he had stopped making these types of videos.

“In the very beginning I accepted lots of requests from people who wanted to join my live streams. How am I supposed to know?” he asked.

Kozak, who also claimed to be making £25,000-a-month from his social media celebrity status, insisted his videos on UK drug production were “not popular” and that he “didn’t like those livestreams”.

“You can’t be 100 percent sure that these persons were in England, maybe they were in the USA,” he added.

Braci claimed not to endorse a criminal lifestyle and suggested those who had gone to work in British drug farms did so “because of a life filled with hardships”.

“They go there from here with a background full of debt, problems, even lack of basic things like food. They go there in cannabis houses because that’s the only option for some,” he said.

Towards the end of the interview Kozak grew nervous and demanded we remove the discussions about cannabis farms.

“People might say things like ‘why have you talked about my farm, why are you putting me in trouble’. Once they have kidnapped me. I’m worried, I don’t want trouble with the police. Back then I wasn’t famous. It was the very first days [of my Instagram account and] the audience number [watching] the live streams was about 100,” he said.

University of Essex senior lecturer Dr. Alexandros K. Antoniou, an expert in social media law, said it was “astonishing” that Instagram had not only let Braci share this type of content but enabled him to become the biggest star in Albania on its platform after doing so.

He added: “But at the same time we’ve known social media platforms so far have been a bit relaxed about what sort of content is being hosted.”

When the Express approached Instagram’s owners Meta the company did not offer any explanation for why it had enabled Braci to become so popular. It also took no visible action against his account.

In a general statement a Meta spokesperson said: “Buying, selling or soliciting drugs is not allowed on our platforms; our teams use a mix of technology and human review to remove this content as quickly as possible, and we work with the police and youth organisations to get better at detection.

“We’ve also worked with industry experts to tackle the issue of people smuggling for a number of years, and when we find content coordinating this illegal activity we remove it from our platforms.”

TikTok also did not penalise Kozak stating: “We continue to strictly maintain a zero tolerance approach to human exploitation and proactively find over 95% of content we remove for breaking these rules.”