snakehead

Snakeheads are Chinese gangs which smuggle people to other countries. They appear often especially in the Fujian region of China and smuggle their "customers" often into more wealthy Western countries like the United Kingdom or the United States. The name snakehead comes from the people being smuggled, often called "man-snake" in the Chinese language. The people who organize the smuggling are therefore called snakeheads (head of (man-)snakes), which is in fact a word-by-word translation of the Chinese term