German Police Shut Down Dark Web Child Porn Website with 400,000 Members

German police have reportedly arrested four members of a gang suspected to be behind one of the largest child porn sites in the world with more than 400,000 members worldwide.

NBC News reports that German police have arrested four members of a gang suspected of running one of the world’s largest child abuse image websites with more than 400,000 members. A police operation that involved both regional and federal German officers raided seven addresses in Germany and arrested three men accused of operating the dark web site known as “Boystown.”

The website was used to distribute indecent and pornographic images and videos of children, according to a statement from the BKA, Germany’s federal police agency. Police also arrested one man in Paraguay who is due to be extradited to Frankfurt. The arrests took place in mid-April but were only announced this week.

The website is no longer operating according to the BKA, adding that a number of other related chat websites were also shut down. The three men that were arrested were said to be aged between 40 and 64 years old but their names have not been released in accordance with German law.

The three suspects are accused of maintaining the site, as well as offering advice to users on how to avoid arrest. One of them, a 64-year-old man from Hamburg, is accused of uploading more than 3,500 images to the site himself.

The BKA stated: “Furthermore, members of the platform received safety instructions from them for secure surfing on ‘Boystown’ in order to minimize the risk of discovery by law enforcement authorities.”

The pan-European police agency Europol assisted in the months-long investigation alongside authorities in the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. The site operated on the dark web, an encrypted network of web pages that are not accessible via normal web browsers and search engines.

The police stated that the website has existed since at least June 2019 and “served the worldwide exchange of child pornography by platform members, whereby mainly recordings of abuse of boys were exchanged.”

Police stated that the site was structured to allow convenient access to images and videos of “the most serious sexual abuse of young children.”