The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced indictments of the operator of a “darknet” child pornography website and hundreds of the site’s users. The website, called Welcome to Video, has been labeled “the largest child sexual exploitation market by volume of content.”
Working with South Korea and other countries, law enforcement officials arrested 337 site users, including dozens of individuals in the U.S. The operation resulted in the rescue of at least 23 minor victims in the U.S., Spain and the United Kingdom, who were being actively abused by users of the site.
The investigation was kickstarted in 2018 with the arrest of a Korean national, Jong Woo Son, age 23, after he inadvertently revealed the website’s IP address. The arrest was kept secret while law enforcement unearthed the names and locations of others using the site. “Customers” either used bitcoin or uploaded fresh content to the site as “payment” for downloading child porn videos.
Officials seized approximately 250,000 videos of child sexual exploitation. Some of the children were as young as 6 months old, and law enforcement officials are trying to identify and rescue them. The website operated from June 2015 to March 2018 and processed 7,300 bitcoin transactions worth more than $730,000.
Perhaps surprisingly, most of the U.S. individuals arrested are young, white-collar professionals. According to Jeff Dion, chief executive officer of the Zero Abuse Project, “They are not the people we usually think of when we think of someone who is viewing child pornography. It increases awareness in all parts of society that no one is immune. It can happen anywhere.”
The DOJ is promising to keep up the fight to stop child sexual exploitation. According to U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu, “Children around the world are safer because of the actions taken by U.S. and foreign law enforcement to prosecute this case and recover funds for victims. We will continue to pursue such criminals on and off the darknet in the United States and abroad, to ensure they receive the punishment their terrible crimes deserve.”
According to Techopedia.com, the “darknet” refers to “networks that are not indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. These are networks that are only available to a select group of people and not to the general internet public, and only accessible via authorization, specific software and configurations.” That’s how child porn sites manage to stay hidden from authorities.
This isn’t the first major bust the DOJ has announced this year related to child sexual exploitation. In June, the department announced the arrests of nearly 1,700 suspected child sex predators across the U.S. by its Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces during Operation “Broken Heart.”
Sexual exploitation of children is despicable, and the DOJ deserves praise for its recent successes in fighting this growing cancer. ICAC operations began in 1998, and since then 95,500 individuals have been arrested on charges of exploiting children.
Let’s pray for the DOJ’s continuing success in this arena. Our children are too precious for us to fail.
Photo from justice.gov
