Germany, UK and US Take Down Major Darknet Child Porn Sites, Arrest Admins
Police in Germany, the UK and the US have coordinated to arrest several administrators and programmers linked to three darknet child pornography websites with thousands of active users.
The Bavarian State Office for Criminal Investigation and the Central Office for Cybercrime announced on Friday that the three darknet sites had been shut down and individuals linked to the sites had been arrested in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. United.
“Perpetrators should also expect to be condemned and held accountable in this area. Even the Darknet is not a legal loophole,” said Harald Pickert, president of the State Criminal Police Office (LKA), the Austrian tabloid. Kronen Zeitung reports.
Representations of child sexual abuse increased by 109% in Germany https://t.co/CpujLSJs7J
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondres) May 30, 2022
The investigation into the three sites began in 2019 and investigators say more than 20,000 child abuse images and videos were distributed there per month.
In collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States, the LKA was able to arrest an American website administrator and programmer in the first half of 2022, while the main administration of the sites was arrested in the United States in November with two moderators arrested the same month in the UK.
Another man, 22, was arrested in the German city of Bonn in November. He is accused of having worked as a moderator. Many users of the sites have also reportedly been identified by the authorities.
The arrests are just the latest dark web police operations undertaken in recent years and come after US authorities arrested and charged the operator of a prominent child exploitation darknet site in 2019 after servers were discovered. containing eight terabytes of child pornography material in South Korea. .
Jong Woo Son, the 23-year-old website operator, was charged alongside 337 other users, as investigators were able to track them through server logs and bitcoin transfers.
Last April, German police busted another website touted as the largest drug-trafficking market on the dark web, with around 17 million users, and seized Bitcoin worth $23 million. euros.
German police shut down ‘Darknet’ platform and seize $25 million worth of Bitcoinhttps://t.co/UUFpVRhjCu
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondres) April 5, 2022
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or by e-mail at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.
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