الشبكة العالمية المؤلفة من ٠٠٠ ٨٧ شخص تم تفكيكهم - لا تزال وسائط الإعلام التابعة للولايات المتحدة صامتة

German cybercrime investigators pulled the plug on Elysium, a hidden-service forum that had grown to about 87,000 members trading images and videos of the sexual abuse of children, including toddlers. The site lived on the darknet — the corner of the internet that does not show up in Google and requires specialized software to reach — and it had been running since late 2016.

Deutsche Welle reported that Frankfurt authorities described Elysium as a marketplace for the worst material they had seen, used not only to swap files but to arrange real-world abuse. The suspected operator, a 39-year-old man from Hesse, was arrested on June 12 after a search of his home and the seizure of the server. Other suspects were taken into custody in Germany and Austria. Dutch police assisted.

Elysium was not the largest case of its kind even then. The U.S. Justice Department had already seized Playpen, a darknet platform whose administrator, Steven Chase, later drew a 30-year federal sentence. That investigation carried its own stain: the FBI ran Playpen for a stretch after taking it over, and later dropped cases rather than disclose the Tor exploit it had used. الزوجات و مؤسسة الجبهة الإلكترونية وثّق ذلك الاختيار - وهو حماية طريقة الاختراق مع السماح لبعض المتهمين بالمشي.

ذهب المشغلون إلى السجن

The German probe was run by the Central Office for Combating Cybercrime (ZIT) in Giessen, attached to the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor General. In March 2019 a regional court in Limburg سجن أربعة رجال ألمان for founding and running the forum. Sentences ran from three years and ten months to nine years and nine months. The oldest defendant, 63, was also convicted of abusing two small children. German authorities said 14 suspects in all, including five Germans, were arrested and sentenced in connection with the network.

"الشبكات أصبحت أكبر بعد "الليسيوم

Elysium was a warning, not a peak. In April 2025, German federal police and Europol took down Kidflix, a darknet streaming platform with nearly two million registered users across 35 countries. Operation Stream produced 79 arrests and more than 1,400 identifications. Some of those arrested had not only watched the material; they had abused children themselves. Britain’s National Crime Agency passed 63 UK user identities to local forces. The same German cybercrime machinery that broke Elysium in 2017 was still hunting these networks eight years later, and the membership numbers had grown by more than an order of magnitude.

وأعطت أخبار الكابلات الأمريكية كيفليكس جزءا من التغطية التي ستستقبلها محاكمة المشاهير. هذا الصمت هو نفس النمط الذي عرفه هذا الموقع عندما سقط (إيليسيوم) من أجل خريطة أوسع لحماية النخبة حول الاتجار بالأطفال الاختباء على مرأى البصر: تعرض خاتم الأطفال العالميايمي ج. بيرج سر مفتوحو صون الصمت.

ولا ينبغي لأي شخص يلتقي بمواد يشتبه في أنها اعتداءات جنسية على الأطفال أن يحاول التحقيق فيها بنفسه. في الولايات المتحدة يمكن إبلاغها إلى المركز الوطني لمفقودات "السايبر تيبلاين الأطفال المفقودين"