had arrested hundreds of criminals in a global crackdown after
taking down the largest known child porn site on the dark web and
tracing payments made in bitcoins.
With an international coalition of law enforcement agencies,
federal officials have arrested the administrator of the child
sexual abuse site, 23-year-old Jong Woo Son of South Korea, along
with 337 suspects who have been charged for allegedly using the
site.
The site in question is “Welcome to Video,” which operated from
June 2015 until March 2018 and hosted over 250,000 sexual
exploitation videos of children, toddlers, and infants, which
comprised of roughly over 8TB of data.
According to a press release
published by DoJ, the Welcome to Video site hosted more than
250,000 unique videos, and almost 45 percent of the videos contain
new images that have not been previously known to exist.
[1]
The operation also resulted in the rescue of at least 23 children
residing in the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom, who
were being actively abused by the users of the Welcome to Video
site, which operated on the encrypted Tor network.
Site Was Hosted on a Server Running from Bedroom of the
Admin
Merely reviewing the HTML source code of the site in the browser
revealed the original IP addresses of the server on which the site
was hosted.
The IP addresses were then traced back to a server located
inside the bedroom of the site admin Jong Woo Son’s house in South
Korea.
unique bitcoin addresses that were used to receive payments from
visitors, indicating that the website had the capacity for at least
one million users.
The United States issued a warrant for Son’s arrest in February
2018. Federal authorities in South Korea then arrested him on March
5, 2018, and seized the server used to operate Welcome To
Video.
Though Son is currently serving an 18-month sentence in South
Korea, a federal grand jury in Washington DC unsealed a 9-count
indictment against him just yesterday, with the U.S. authorities
seeking his extradition to face justice.
“Darknet sites that profit from the sexual exploitation of children
are among the most vile and reprehensible forms of criminal
behavior,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of
the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
“This Administration will not allow child predators to use lawless
online spaces as a shield. Today’s announcement demonstrates that
the Department of Justice remains firmly committed to working
closely with our partners in South Korea and around the world to
rescue child victims and bring to justice the perpetrators of these
abhorrent crimes.”
Total 337 Site Users Were Also Arrested and Charged
The users of the site—which were from the U.S., U.K., South Korea,
Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic,
Spain, Brazil, and Australia—could download videos by uploading new
videos, referring new users, or paying in “supposedly anonymous”
cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
enforcement officials were allegedly involved in the child porn
site—Paul Casey Whipple, 35-year-old U.S. Border Patrol Agent, and
Richard Nikolai Gratkowski, a former HSI special agent.
Moreover, two users of the Welcome to Video dark market site
committed suicide following the execution of search warrants.
“Welcome To Video offered these videos for sale using the
cryptocurrency bitcoin. Typically, sites of this kind give users a
forum to trade in these depictions. This Darknet website is among
the first of its kind to monetize child exploitation videos using
bitcoin,” the press release reads.
BTC, equivalent to $370,000 at the time when the site was taken
down, through at least 7300 transactions.
References
- ^
press release
(www.justice.gov)
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