Germany, UK, U.S. Bust Major Darknet Child Porn Sites, Arrest Admins

Police in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States coordinated to arrest several administrators and programmers linked to three darknet child pornography websites with thousands of active users.

The Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation and the Central Office of Cybercrime announced Friday that the three darknet sites had been shut down and that individuals linked to the sites had been arrested in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

“The perpetrators must also expect to be convicted and held accountable in this area. Even the Darknet is not a legal vacuum,” State Criminal Police Office (LKA) president Harald Pickert, the Austrian tabloid Kronen Zeitung reports.

The investigation into the three sites began in 2019 and investigators say over 20,000 images and videos of child abuse were distributed on them per month.

Working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the USA, the LKA was able to arrest an American website administrator and programmer in the first half of 2022, while the main administration of the sites was arrested in the USA in November along with two moderators who were arrested that same month in the United Kingdom.

Another man, a 22-year-old, was arrested in the German city of Bonn in November. He is alleged to have worked as a moderator. Numerous users of the sites are also said to have been identified by authorities.

The arrests are just the latest dark web police operations undertaken in recent years and come after authorities in the United States arrested and charged the operator of a major child exploitation darknet site in 2019 after servers containing eight terabytes of child abuse material were found in South Korea.

Jong Woo Son, the 23-year-old operator of the website, was charged alongside 337 other users as investigators were able to track them down through server logs and Bitcoin transfers.

Last April, German police busted another website touted as the largest drug trafficking marketplace on the dark web, with around 17 million users, and seized Bitcoin worth 23 million euros.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.