“Boystown” trial: prison sentences and preventive detention for operators of child porn platform | hessenschau.de

Four men have been sentenced to several years in prison for running the Boystown child porn platform. Two of the accused have to be placed in preventive detention after serving their sentence.

In the trial against four alleged operators of the child pornographic Darknet platform “Boystown”, the verdict was announced at the Frankfurt Regional Court on Tuesday. Before that, the accused men, aged between 42 and 66, had the opportunity to have a last word.

One of the men has to go to prison for twelve years, and the judges also imposed preventive detention on the 49-year-old suspected operator of the platform from the Mühldorf am Inn district in Bavaria. A 42-year-old from the Paderborn district had to go to prison for ten and a half years, and preventive detention was also imposed here. The two men were also convicted of serious sexual violence against children.

Judge: “considerable criminal energy”

The judges spoke of “considerable criminal energy” of the accused. Files have been exchanged internationally on the platform for years. Sexual abuse always has psychological and physical consequences for the victims, the extent of which cannot be foreseen, said presiding judge Christian Annen. To protect the victims, the trial was largely closed to the public.

In their verdict, the judges acknowledged that the 42-year-old had worked extensively with the investigators. He said of his own accord that the server would encrypt itself if a password was not entered.

Caught sitting at the computer

The preventive detention, which had previously been demanded by the Attorney General’s Office for both, is the severest sanction in German criminal law. The perpetrators remain behind bars for the time being even after the prison sentence has been served. This is to protect the population from dangerous criminals.

A 60-year-old man from northern Germany who lived in Paraguay and was caught sitting at a computer there has been sentenced to eight years in prison. He had been caught while logged into Boystown as an administrator. This was the only way the officials got access to the Darknet site, which mainly documented the sexual abuse of boys.

Platform with more than 400,000 members from all over the world

The judges imposed a seven-year sentence on a 66-year-old defendant from Hamburg, who is said to have been a particularly active user with more than 3,600 amounts.

The four men are said to have built and operated the platform with more than 400,000 user accounts from all over the world. When the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office shut down the platform in April 2021, there were more than a million forum posts there. Included were recordings of some of the most severe sexual violence against children. The platform was founded in June 2019.

The Central Office for Combating Internet Crime, which is responsible for these cases nationwide, is located at the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office.