Most people, myself included, would probably assume that busting child porn sites would be the job of the police or national organizations like the RCMP in Canada or the FBI in the US. Many of these sites hide behind the supposed anonymity of electronic currency transactions using Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. But these transactions aren't anonymous and they can be traced with the right software, as the owners and customers of the world's largest child porn site found out to their dismay when they got taken down by the IRS.
This article from Wired reads like a true crime novel and is absolutely fascinating in how it peels back the layers of obfuscation used by criminals. It's also chilling in what it reveals about the people who upload and use the videos on these sites. It's a long read but well worth the time.
Ultimately, from the beginning of the case through the year and a half that followed the server seizure, global law enforcement would arrest no fewer than 337 people for their involvement with Welcome to Video. They also removed 23 children from sexually exploitative situations.
Those 337 arrests still represented only a small fraction of Welcome to Video’s total registered users. When the US team examined their copy of the server data in Korea, they had found thousands of accounts on the site. But the vast majority of them had never paid any bitcoins into the site’s wallets. With no money to follow, the investigators’ trail usually went cold.
If not for cryptocurrency, in other words, and the years-long trap set by its purported untraceability, the majority of the 337 pedophiles arrested in the Welcome to Video case—and their rescued victims—likely never would have been found.
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