UK Visa Portal spilled thousands of applicants’ passports and selfies online — and hasn’t fixed the leak
The UK Visa Portal has been found to expose sensitive information, including passports and selfies of applicants seeking U.K. immigration visas. This security lapse affects at least 100,000 documents and has not been addressed by the company. TechCrunch has attempted to notify the company but has not received a response from its management regarding the ongoing issue.
- ▪The UK Visa Portal is not affiliated with the U.K. government.
- ▪At least 100,000 applicants' documents are exposed online.
- ▪TechCrunch confirmed the data leak by contacting affected individuals.
- ▪The company has no way to report security issues through its website.
- ▪Applicants are advised to use the official GOV.UK website for visa applications.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 13 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/uk-visa-portal-spilled-thousands-of-applicants-passports-and-selfies-online-and-hasnt-fixed-the-leak/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 23:49:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T23:52:55.448Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T02:52:53.325Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | qOTV_pcmAPlO · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A website called UK Visa Portal is publicly exposing the passports and selfie photos of applicants who signed up and paid the site to obtain a U.K immigration visa, TechCrunch has learned. An anonymous person notified TechCrunch about the security lapse, saying that the website is exposing at least 100,000 documents from people who uploaded their passports and selfies to the website as part of the application process. The website is not affiliated with the U.K. government, and some have complained that they mistakenly paid a fee to this company instead of using the official GOV.UK website. TechCrunch confirmed that UK Visa Portal is the source of the data leak and verified the authenticity of the exposed data by contacting affected individuals to ask if their information was accurate.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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