Cuckooing is a form of crime, termed by the police, in which the home of a vulnerable person is taken over by a criminal in order to use it to deal, store or take drugs, facilitate sex work, as a place for them to live, or to financially abuse the tenant. The practice is associated with

county lines drug trafficking In the United Kingdom, the county lines drug supply model is the practice of trafficking drugs into rural areas and smaller towns, away from major cities. Criminal gangs recruit and exploit vulnerable children, sometimes including children in p ...

. As of the 2010s, cuckooing was becoming an increasingly common problem in the South of England. The term ''cuckooing'', with reference to an undesirable trespasser whose purpose is to use the victim's home as a base for

in the UK, comes from the

cuckoo Cuckoos are birds in the Cuculidae family, the sole taxon in the order Cuculiformes . The cuckoo family includes the common or European cuckoo, roadrunners, koels, malkohas, couas, coucals and anis. The coucals and anis are sometimes separ ...

's practice of taking over other birds' nests for its young. In this context, the term was mentioned in 1992 by Michael E. Buerger, was subsequently overlooked, and then regained wider use from 2010.

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