crime
Child pornography platform with millions of photos shut down
Investigators have managed a major blow in the distribution of child pornography images (current photo). photo
© Oliver Berg/dpa
Alcohol to make girls submissive: Investigators have shut down a child pornography platform on the Darknet, and leading backers are in custody.
Several hundred thousand users worldwide, millions of images of child pornography on one computer alone: investigators have a huge Platform for child pornography content with images and videos on the Darknet shut down and six suspected backers from Germany taken into custody.
“It was a Girl Lover Forum,” reported the head of the investigative commission, Kai-Arne Gailer, at a press conference in Duisburg on Tuesday. Only girls, some three-year-olds and even babies, were abused. “If you listen to the soundtracks on the videos, you can feel sick.”
The investigations against current and future suspects continued: There are possible users and cross-connections on all continents of the world. For investigative reasons, the investigator was very reticent to say how the police tracked down the suspects. He didn’t even want to mention the name of the platform that was switched off.
Raids in six federal states
There were searches in six federal states in September – for example in Minden and Jüchen in North Rhine-Westphalia. The investigators secured extensive evidence, some of it from running computers. A total of 1,517 exhibits such as laptops and cell phones were found. The seized DVDs and video cassettes alone filled 94 moving boxes. The exact amount of data cannot currently be estimated – nor can the number of victims, said Gailer.
NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) said 13.5 terabytes of data had to be evaluated on the computer of just one accused – that corresponds to around 3.4 million photos.
Up to 15 years in prison
According to Reul, the platform on the Darknet, which has now been switched off, has been in operation since 2019. This makes it one of the longest-lasting illegal platforms for exchanging disgusting images, said the minister. The suspects face prison sentences of between 2 and 15 years, as the head of the Central and Contact Center for Cybercrime NRW (ZAC), Markus Hartmann, said. The success of the investigation was a “bang of a bang,” emphasized North Rhine-Westphalia Justice Minister Benjamin Limbach (Greens). This shows the perpetrators: “You can’t hide.”
Investigator Gailer described the processes: No money flowed into the platform, but the participants, who often had long experience in the child pornography scene, exchanged huge amounts of data, also in order to win so-called reputation points with other users and to build their position and status in the group .
Refusals were not accepted
Gailer said he never felt any understanding of the destruction of children’s souls through the abuse through the countless videos. The small children were talked about in a disturbing way as “pure sex objects”.
Refusals were not accepted. “Children were made submissive through gifts and persuasion. There were discussions about which alcoholics, which narcotics, which medications made the children weak,” said Gailer.
More backers abroad
The men now taken into custody are considered leading organizers of the German branch of the darknet platform. The suspects are two 45- and 56-year-old men from North Rhine-Westphalia, a 43-year-old from Schleswig-Holstein, a 61-year-old from Baden-Württemberg, a 62-year-old from Lower Saxony, a 69-year-old from Rhineland-Palatinate and a 45-year-old from Bavaria, it was said. Presumably about as many of the platform’s executives would have worked abroad.
Appeal to the perpetrators: get help, show remorse
The access caused considerable unrest in the scene and made things difficult for the perpetrators, said Minister Limbach. Chief investigator Gailer said he suspects that many of them also watched the press conference that was streamed on the Internet and then addressed the perpetrators directly via camera: There is still a chance to get help and show remorse, he said. “If so, then now.” When the police are at the door, it is too late.
ZAC boss Hartmann emphasized that the success of the search was only a limited reason to celebrate because of the huge number of unreported cases. His agency has conducted more than 25,000 investigations since it was founded in 2020. “We are fully utilized to capacity.”