One of world’s biggest sites for sharing child sex abuse images has been taken down by German investigators, it was revealed today.
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) said the “Boystown” platform had more than 400,000 members on the ‘darknet’. Some images and video showed the most serious sexual abuse of young children.
The inquiry involved law enforcement agencies in the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, the US and Canada. EU police agency Europol will examine intelligence from the operation, and ‘more arrests and rescues are to be expected globally’.
The dark net is an internet area beyond the reach of mainstream search engines.
(Image: Getty Images/Cultura RF)
Several related paedophile chat sites were also dismantled. Three German nationals have been arrested.
Two, aged 40 and 49, were held in Germany. A third, 58, was arrested in Paraguay. They were said to have been site administrators.
Another suspect, 64, from Hamburg, is alleged to have been one of the most active users of the platform with more than 3500 posts.
(Image: Getty Images)
The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Frankfurt, the BKA and online investigators searched seven addresses across Germany in mid-April.
Eva Kühne-Hörmann, Justice Minister for the region of Hesse, hailed the operation as a “fantastic success in the fight against sexual violence against children and young people”.
The platform has been on the darknet since at least June 2019. Images and videos were exchanged by users around the world, showing mainly abuse of boys.
The BKA said the forum was “divided into different areas in order to enable structured filing and easy retrieval of content.”
There were also two chat areas – with different language channels.
Police in Germany confirmed the site had been taken down.
