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. Wired and the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented that choice — protecting a hacking method while letting some accused offenders walk.
The Operators Went to Prison
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 jailed four German men 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.
The Networks Got Bigger After Elysium
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.
U.S. cable news gave Kidflix a fraction of the coverage a celebrity trial would receive. That silence is the same pattern this site flagged when Elysium first came down. For the larger map of elite protection around child-sex trafficking, see Hiding In Plain Sight: The Global Pedophile Ring Exposed, Amy J. Berg’s 一个打开的秘密,以及 Conspiracy of Silence.
Anyone who encounters suspected child sexual abuse material should never attempt to investigate it themselves. In the United States it can be reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, and elsewhere to local law enforcement.
