The Bavarian Cybercrime Central Office (ZCB) initiated 18,433 proceedings last year. The Bavarian Ministry of Justice announced on Tuesday in Munich that she managed to achieve the first relevant nationwide conviction for operating criminal trading platforms on the Internet. The Center for Combating Child Pornography and Sexual Abuse of Children on the Internet (ZKI), which is located within the ZCB, recorded 8,146 cases in the previous year.
“Criminals are increasingly operating in the digital space,” said Bavaria’s Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich (CSU) on the occasion of Safer Internet Day (February 6). “They are breaking into new areas to steal data and money or to trade illegal goods. This is why the judiciary is also increasingly investigating the Internet crime scene.” The central office located in Bamberg has taken a pioneering role in the fight against cybercrime.
Eisenreich appealed to the federal government to revive traffic data storage. The mandatory, temporary storage of IP addresses is urgently needed in order to be able to identify the perpetrators of serious crimes such as sexual abuse of children. “IP addresses can also be an important or even the only lead in the prosecution of other serious and serious crimes, such as terrorism or organized drug and weapons trafficking,” said the Justice Minister.
The ZCB investigators tried, among other things, to track down perpetrators in the area of organized cybercrime and the trafficking of weapons, drugs and child pornography in the digital world and bring them to justice. Since its founding in 2015, the central office has initiated more than 82,000 procedures, it said. While there were initially two public prosecutors working for the ZCB, the team now consists of 25 public prosecutors who are supported by four IT forensics experts.