“Unsurprisingly, the defendant’s devices also contained an enormous collection of images and videos depicting the rape and abuse of children.” The Operation Grayskull investigation launched in 2020, when law enforcement agents noticed a spike in traffic to a dark web site suspected of hosting child abuse material. The dark web child abuse sites eventually attracted more than 120,000 members, millions of files and at least 100,000 visits in a single day, according to an FBI official who spoke with CBS News. The authorities said the platform was “one of the world’s biggest child pornography darknet platforms” and had been active at least since 2019. Pedophiles used it to exchange and watch pornography of children and toddlers, most of them boys, from all over the world.
The surge in criminal activity on the dark web accounted for only a fraction of the 18.4 million reports of abuse last year. That number originates almost entirely with tech companies based in the United States. “People who traffic in child exploitation materials are on the cutting edge of technology,” said Susan Hennessey, a former lawyer at the National Security Agency who researches cybersecurity at the Brookings Institution. The nonprofit center has relied in large measure on 20-year-old technology, has difficulty keeping experienced engineers on staff and, by its own reckoning, regards stopping the online distribution of photos and videos secondary to rescuing children.
The ‘bulk’ of the suspects identified by investigators were between 20 and 40 years old, with the average age around 31, senior prosecutor Thomas Goger said at the press conference. As part of the operation, German authorities intervened on 96 occasions to safeguard children. Users gained access to videos using tokens bought using cryptocurrency or earned through tasks, such as categorising videos or uploading abusive material. Authorities remain committed to following leads, bringing more offenders to justice, and dismantling similar networks worldwide.
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- Louis Donald Mendonsa, 62, of Sacramento, pleaded guilty in April to seven counts of distribution of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography, according to the U.S.
- Youth can also face legal consequences for child sexual abuse material despite their own status as a minor.
- Police have since arrested 79 people in connection with the investigation, but more than 1,400 suspects who used the site have been identified.
- The Department of Justice said two users of the site died by suicide after the execution of search warrants.
- Generative AI is exacerbating the problem of online child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), as watchdogs report a proliferation of deepfake content featuring real victims’ imagery.
At its conclusion, Cannon called McIntosh’s propensity to abuse children the most severe she had ever seen. The attorney stressed that McIntosh’s managerial role on the website was different from that of his codefendants. He said McIntosh mostly oversaw the site’s fantasy and roleplay rooms, where “sick people engage in a game” of pretend sexual abuse.
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More than a decade ago, when the reported number was less than a million, the proliferation of the explicit imagery had already reached a crisis point. Tech companies, law enforcement agencies and legislators in Washington responded, committing to new measures meant to rein in the scourge. Additionally, there is also likely to be a traumatic impact on moderators and investigators having to view abuse images in the finest details to identify if they are “real” or “generated” images.
Our analysis showed that members of these forums are using non-AI-generated images and videos already at their disposal to facilitate their learning and train the software they use to create the images. Many expressed their hopes and expectations that the technology would evolve, making it even easier for them to create this material. Other users potentially uploaded fake child sex images generated by artificial intelligence, as police found AI CSAM on one suspect’s devices, Todo Alicante reported.
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The Times found that there was a close relationship between the center and Silicon Valley that raised questions about good governance practices. For example, the center receives both money and in-kind donations from tech companies, while employees of the same companies are sometimes members of its board. Google alone has donated nearly $4 million in the past decade, according to public testimony. The center has said it intends to make significant improvements to its technology starting in 2020, but the problems don’t stop there. The police complain that the most urgent reports are not prioritized, or are sent to the wrong department completely.
The takedown of Kidflix was the result of a massive international investigation, spearheaded by German law enforcement with support from Europol. The Justice Department says the arrests are connected to a 10-month investigation between federal law enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europol in Europe. Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement together with the Federal Criminal Police Office that in mid-April three German suspects, said to be the administrators of the “Boystown” platform, were arrested along with a German user.
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- This is, of course, particularly the case for the age group we are looking closer at in this study.
- Law enforcement globally has warned that a flood of AI CSAM is making it harder to identify real victims, which could complicate Europol’s task of protecting more kids through its ongoing investigation.
- And when tech companies cooperate fully, encryption and anonymization can create digital hiding places for perpetrators.
- Along with the dark web, mainstream social media platforms have become a hunting grounds for child predators.
- Despite its mandate by Congress, the center is not subject to public records laws and operates with little transparency.
“The website monetized the sexual abuse of children and was one of the first to offer sickening videos for sale using the cryptocurrency bitcoin,” the NCA said in a statement. These incredibly realistic deepfake, or partially synthetic, videos of child rape and torture are made by offenders using AI tools that add the face or likeness of a real person or victim. — A Boone, North Carolina, man was sentenced to eight years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release Saturday for using the dark web to transport child pornography, according to the Department of Justice.
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The site operated on the dark web, a protective section of the internet that can only be accessed via a Tor browser. All ‘self-generated’ child sexual abuse imagery is horrific, and our analysts sadly see it every day, but seeing so many very young children in these images and videos is particularly distressing. The images seen can range from a display of genitals to a child penetrating themselves or another child and all for the gratification of an unknown predator. While children grow up, it is quite normal for there to be an element of sexual experimentation and body-curiosity; that is not what we find in these ‘self-generated’ images and videos of child sexual abuse. To be clear, the term ‘self-generated’ does not mean that the child is instigating the creation of this sexual content themselves, instead they are being groomed, coerced and in some cases blackmailed into engaging in sexual behaviour. Once inside, they can find vast criminals networks, including those peddling child sexual abuse material on a massive scale, Mistri adds.
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Also named was Richard Nikolai Gratkowsi, 40, of San Antonio, a former agent for Homeland Security Investigations, who pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography and one count of access with intent to view it. The indictment says the site carried numerous graphic videos depicting adults engaged in sexual acts with children as young as 2 years old. Viewers could use a search engine to pick videos by age, including “preteen hardcore” and “pedophile.”
The idea that a 3–6-year-old child has unsupervised access to an internet enabled device with camera will be a shock to many people, however, the fact that young children are easily manipulated by predators will be no surprise. Many of the images were being sold by offenders on the clear web in place of ‘real’ CSAM. These included dedicated commercial sites and forums which include links to subscription-based file hosting services. The report also underscores how fast the technology is improving in its ability to generate fully synthetic AI videos of CSAM. One “shocking” 18-second fully AI-generated video, found by IWF analysts on the clear web, shows an adult male raping a girl who appears about 10 years old. The video flickers and glitches but IWF analysts describe the activity as clear and continuous.
Sometimes children are completely unaware they are being recorded and that there is then a image or video of them being shared by abusers. Many of these images are taken at home in children’s bedrooms or in family bathrooms when the child is alone or with another child such as a sibling or friend. “Our research shows there are serious knowledge gaps amongst the public regarding AI – specifically its ability to cause harm to children. The reality is that people are using this new, and unregulated, technology to create some of the worst sexual images of children, as well as so-called ’nudified’ images of real children, including children who have been abused.
After running the site for the first six months, owner Benjamin Faulkner of North Bay, Ontario, Canada, was captured by the United States Department of Homeland Security. For the remaining eleven months the website was owned and operated by the Australian Queensland Police Service’s Task Force Argos, as part of Operation Artemis. “Unlike other known platforms of this kind, Kidflix not only enabled users to download child sexual abuse material but also to stream video files.
Officers have since identified a total of 63 suspects across the UK and 30 people have been arrested. Investigators viewed the hundreds of arrests as a success for authorities in their battle against illegal sites, which use cryptocurrencies because of their presumed anonymity and ability to render purchasers untraceable. The AUSTRAC transactions suggested many users over time escalated the frequency of access to the live-stream facilitators and increasingly spent larger amounts on each session. The live-streaming nature of the material was particularly sickening, the institute’s report noted, because of the real-time element. The shocking statistics were revealed on Wednesday in a report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, which says it has identified more than 2,700 financial transactions linked to 256 webcam child predators between 2006 and 2018.
There can be a great deal of pressure for a young person to conform to social norms by engaging in sexting, and they may face coercion or manipulation if they go against the status quo. It is important that youth know that they have the ability to say NO to anything that makes them uncomfortable or is unsafe. They should also be informed about the risks of sexting so that they have the language to make safe decisions and navigate this in their own peer group.
