337 Arrested Worldwide After Dark Web Child Porn Bust

Following the conviction of one of the United Kingdom’s worst child sex offenders, hundreds of alleged pedophiles have been arrested in an international operation.

A total of 337 suspects were arrested by an international task force across 38 different countries, including the United States, UK, Ireland, Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Canada, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The arrests followed the discovery of a hidden dark web site called Welcome to Video. Investigators said the site hosted more than 250,000 videos of child sexual abuse that had been downloaded over a million times. Operating on the Tor network from June 2015 until it was seized in March 2018, it grew into what U.S. prosecutors later called the largest child sexual exploitation marketplace by volume of content ever found, with roughly 1.2 million user accounts worldwide and about 4,000 paying members.

According to the NCA, the site was run from South Korea and was one of the first to profit from videos of the sexual abuse of children, selling access via Bitcoin. That reliance on cryptocurrency proved to be its undoing: U.S. authorities traced the flow of Bitcoin payments through the blockchain to identify the administrator and, ultimately, users around the world.

The Welcome to Video site was uncovered by the NCA while the agency was investigating a geophysicist named Dr. Matthew Falder. Falder is serving a 25-year prison sentence after admitting to 137 offenses, which included encouraging the rape of children and sharing images in 2017 of a newborn baby being abused.

In the UK, 18 investigations were developed from the intelligence, which by the time of the takedown announcement had led to the conviction of seven men, each serving up to 15 years in prison.

One of the most serious UK cases to emerge from Welcome to Video was that of 26-year-old Kyle Fox, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison in March 2019 for the rape of a five-year-old boy and for abusing a three-year-old girl in material connected to the site.

Crucially, the operation was not only about arrests. Authorities said the investigation led to the rescue of at least 23 abused children in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain — one of the outcomes officials pointed to as the real measure of the case.

The international task force the NCA set up led to Welcome to Video being seized and dismantled. It included Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in the United States, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police (the Bundeskriminalamt), and the South Korean National Police.

@NCA_UK Tweeted about the arrests:

Officers from the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) used specialist capabilities to identify 23-year-old Jong Woo Son of South Korea as the man running Welcome to Video. NCA officers traveled to South Korea in March 2018 and, working with HSI and the IRS, advised on the operation and assisted in Son’s arrest and the seizure of the website’s server.

Son had already been convicted and imprisoned in his home country of South Korea, and in October 2019 a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia charged him with nine counts related to operating the site, alongside a parallel civil forfeiture action aimed at recovering the illicit proceeds and ultimately returning funds to victims of the crime.

His punishment, however, became a point of international contention. Son served only an 18-month sentence in South Korea, and in July 2020 a Seoul court rejected the United States’ request to extradite him to face the American charges — a decision that drew sharp criticism from campaigners, including the Women’s Party of Korea, who argued he had escaped the far stiffer sentence he would likely have faced in the U.S. South Korean prosecutors later pursued him again over the laundering and concealment of the cryptocurrency proceeds he had earned from the site.

The Director of Investigations for the NCA, Nikki Holland, said in a statement: “Dark web child sex offenders – some of whom are the very worst offenders – cannot hide from law enforcement. They’re not as cloaked as they think they are, they’re not as safe as they think they are.”

“The NCA is relentless in pursuing them and we have specialist capabilities, which we use for all UK law enforcement, to unmask them and help take down sites like Welcome To Video.”

“I’m immensely proud of the role we played in catching some very depraved and dangerous global offenders and for beginning the work that eventually caught Jong Woo Son.”

The Welcome to Video takedown remains a landmark in cryptocurrency-enabled crime, demonstrating that the same blockchain ledger offenders relied on to move money anonymously can be turned into a permanent evidence trail. It sits alongside other dark web prosecutions that have followed, such as the killing in prison of Richard Huckle, whose own crimes were exposed through a dark web abuse forum.

This article concerns the investigation of child sexual abuse material. Suspected child exploitation can be reported in the US to the NCMEC CyberTipline at 1-800-843-5678, and in the UK to the NCA’s CEOP.