A box of frozen tomato passata arrived at a BBC office in Cardiff, packed around a syringe labelled “baby batter”. It was the next-day delivery from a man who calls himself Joe Donor – a prolific sperm provider who claims to have fathered 180 children worldwide. The BBC had paid him £100 in cash, sent through the post, without any identity checks or health documents.
Four hours later, a licensed clinic examined the sample. Every sperm cell was dead.
“BBC pays £100 for dead sperm delivered with passata, exposing illegal donor network on social media.”
The investigation, part of BBC Wales Investigates, exposed the ease with which unregulated sperm donation takes place on social media. Using an alias, a reporter arranged the delivery from a man named publicly by a family court judge as Robert Albon, after a case in Cardiff. The judge took the rare step of naming him to warn of the dangers of unregulated donation.
Albon defended his method, telling the BBC that enough sperm for fertilisation usually survived his delivery process and that he had “many successful pregnancies” this way. He questioned how the sample had been stored and transported after arrival.
But the UK’s fertility regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), warned that women are at risk of “exploitation by predatory donors”. The agency said unregulated donation, which occurs outside an HFEA-licensed premises, is a criminal offence in the UK.
Hundreds of men like Albon use Facebook to connect with women desperate to conceive. Some donor groups have up to 40,000 members. The BBC reporter joined one with a blank profile and, alongside genuine messages, received offers of sex, requests for intimate images, and persistent pressure to make arrangements.
“Some of the men continually pushed for sex and tried to persuade me that it would be the cheapest and most effective option,” the reporter wrote.
In one case, a woman warned that she had received a donation from a man in north Wales who she later discovered was a convicted sex offender.
Tianna and her wife Nikki, from south Wales, turned to unregulated donation – the article cut off before providing further details, but their story underscores the lengths to which some go when fertility treatment is out of reach. The BBC’s undercover purchase shows how little stands between a woman seeking a donor and a postman delivering a syringe in a frozen sauce box.