The largest international network for the distribution of child porn in history has been revealed on the darknet

A year ago, investigators from Britain, the United States, South Korea and Germany uncovered the largest underground network in the history of the Internet for the distribution of child pornography. Its center was the Welcome to Video website, located on the darknet, and its tentacles stretched all over the world. Today, more than 300 people have already been arrested in 38 countries in the case of the "largest child porn store", but the investigation is far from over.

It took an international team of investigators almost three years to get close to the distributors of forbidden content and their clients. The Welcome to Video website offered users a record amount of child porn – more than two thousand videos, with a total volume of up to 2 terabytes. It is established that files from the site have been downloaded a total of a million times.

This announcement about the closure of the service was seen a year ago by its regulars, trying to enter the site

A year ago, the online video store was finally closed and investigators began to identify the people who supplied the materials to it, as well as downloaded them for their own use. In addition, a team of specialists identifies the children filmed in the videos in order to be able to help them and find their rapists.

The report of the team of investigators, published on October 18, 2019, says that 337 people have already been arrested in 38 countries. Detentions in this case were carried out in the UK, USA, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the Czech Republic and Canada.

Pedophiles continue to be arrested in different parts of the world

The creator and owner of the site is a 23–year-old South Korean citizen, Jung Woo Song, who is already serving a prison sentence in his homeland. Additionally, the US Department of Justice is preparing to bring charges against him. The British Agency for Combating Crime on the Internet stated that the Welcome to Video portal became one of the first sites offering perverts a specific video for bitcoins.

Despite the impressive scale of the network, which included manufacturers, sellers and consumers of criminal content, it was possible to find out about it by accident. Matthew Falder, a well–known British pedophile who was sentenced to 32 years in prison in his homeland, told about the Welcome to Video service during the investigation. The criminal made a deal with the investigation, thanks to which the term was reduced to 25 years.

For the forbidden content, consumers paid with bitcoins

In total, 7 men were jailed in the UK in the case of a website for pedophiles. One of them was Kyle Fox, who appeared in some videos with Welcome to Video. In March last year, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison for raping a five-year-old boy.

During the investigation, a team of detectives managed to rescue 23 children from the clutches of rapists and molesters. Unfortunately, this is not all and the work on finding children is far from over.

Nikki Holland, head of the investigation department of the British Crime Agency, said at a press conference on the high-profile investigation.

Earlier this year, the Internet was shaken by the scandal with the popular video hosting YouTube, which was chosen by pedophiles as a platform for communication. The management of the service was forced to impose strict restrictions on users in order to stop criminal activity.