MilneNews — October 17, 2019
Excerpts:
Jong Woo Son, 23, a South Korean national, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington DC for running the site Welcome To Video, prosecutors announced on Wednesday.
Investigators say that the website, which operated on the encrypted Tor network, was the largest single online depot of child sexual exploitation by volume of content.
An additional 337 site users living in the U.S. and other countries were arrested in the sting.
The arrests were made in multiple countries including the UK, Ireland, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, and Canada.
Officials said the operation is responsible for the rescue of at least 23 minor victims residing in the U.S., Spain and the UK, who were being actively abused by the users of the site.
‘Darknet sites that profit from the sexual exploitation of children are among the most vile and reprehensible forms of criminal behavior,’ said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
In the U.S., the criminal investigative arms of the Internal Revenue Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement collaborated on the investigation.
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The site hosted more than 200,000 videos of sickening child abuse, including the rape of infants and toddlers, the indictment said.
Users would purchase videos with ‘points’, which they could earn by uploading new videos, referring new users, or simply paying with bitcoin.
Prosecutors say that Son was the administrator of the site, which raked in some $370,000 in bitcoin payments between 2015 and 2018.
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