US, British, German and Korean authorities dismantled one of the world’s largest paedophilia websites, which contained more than 200,000 videos of child pornography, and arrested more than 300 people in 11 countries, US and UK investigators announced on Wednesday.
The Darknet website site, based in South Korea, was one of the first to allow for the purchase of child exploitation videos using bitcoin, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement on Wednesday.
Jong Woo Son, a 23-year-old man from South Korea was named as the administrator of the site, which was described by the DOJ as “the largest market of sexual exploitation of children in terms of volumes of content.”
Son has been serving an 18-month prison sentence for charges related to child pornography, since August 2018.
Welcome to Video, as the now-shuttered site was called, provided unlimited downloads of child porn videos for a monthly subscription. It is estimated that the site hosted approximately 8 TB of content, and allowed its members to upload their own material to share with other members of the community. It collected 250,000 videos, many of which were not yet known to the police, which have been downloaded more than a million times, according to the US Department of Justice.
“Much [of the site] featured preteens, toddlers and infants who participated in sexual behaviours.” The DOJ said.
The investigation was carried out by the DoJ, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and their counterparts in the United Kingdom and South Korea.
To date, 53 alleged paedophiles have been arrested in the United States and dozens more are being investigated. People have also been arrested in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates. In total, 338 people have been arrested in 38 countries.
In addition to the arrests, 23 children in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain who were actively abused by website users were identified and released from their “abuse situation”, the US Department of Justice said.
“We will continue to prosecute such criminals in the Darknet and elsewhere, in the United States and abroad, to ensure that they receive the penalties for their terrible crimes,” US Attorney Jessie Liu said in Washington.
Sources: Reuters, AFP
