Another child porn resource has been closed on the darknet, four administrators have been sentenced

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US Department of Justice has reported the closing .onion-site The Giftbox Exchange, which at the time of termination of the activity there were 72,000 registered users. The child porn site's forums reportedly had over 56,000 posts and were clearly structured by age of victims.

This site was created by Patrick Falte, 29, who lived in Tennessee. He was found guilty and sentenced to 35 years in prison for his involvement in a "business" involving the exploitation of children, three episodes of advertisements for child pornography, and three episodes of distributing child pornography. It is worth saying that this term will only add to the life sentence that Falt was already given in 2017. Then the court found Falt and another former administrator of the site guilty of child sexual abuse, which the criminals gained access to through the user of The Giftbox Exchange.

Falt reportedly ran the site from 2015 to 2016. All hosting costs were paid exclusively in cryptocurrency. The resource was a closed platform (for members only) for the exchange of content. As the site administrator, Falt required new users to upload images or videos of children being sexually abused to gain access to the resource.

Three more administrators of The Giftbox Exchange were also arrested and convicted. Thus, Benjamin Faulkner, who lived in Canada, was Falt's aforementioned accomplice and also received a life sentence back in 2017. Now this term has been added another 35 years of imprisonment. In turn, two other site administrators, Andrew Leslie from Florida and Brett Bedusek from Wisconsin, received 30 and 20 years in prison, respectively.

Worse, an investigation revealed that Leslie was running not only The Giftbox Exchange, but another unnamed Tor site that also allowed child sexual abuse images to be disseminated. Earlier, in March 2018, Leslie had already been sentenced to 60 years in prison, as he was also associated with the production of child pornography with the participation of several children.

Prosecutors say that in addition to paying for hosting in cryptocurrency, site operators used "other advanced technological tools to thwart law enforcement efforts, including file encryption and cryptography."

The details of how the FBI managed to expose the pedophiles are not disclosed and the corresponding court documents are classified. Law enforcement officials strive to keep this information secret so that other criminals do not have the opportunity to change tactics and avoid detection.

 

[Brother]

Law enforcers have shut down a major child porn site. More than 300 people arrested​

The British National Crime Agency and the US Department of Justice spoke about the operation to close the Welcome to Video resource - one of the largest sites on the darknet for the distribution of child porn. Also in the investigation, which lasted several years, law enforcement agencies of Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the Czech Republic took part.

Authorities report the seizure of more than eight terabytes of video (about 250,000 videos) showing the sexual exploitation of children. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is currently analyzing these videos, and it is already known that approximately 45% of the videos studied are new content that was not previously known to exist.

In the United States and 11 other countries of the world, 337 people have already been arrested and charged with one way or another connected with this site. For example, British law enforcement officials report 18 investigations and 7 convicts, one of whom was jailed for 22 years for raping a five-year-old boy and uploading a video on Welcome to Video that sexual showed abuse of a three-year-old girl.

According to the US Department of Justice, at least 23 juvenile victims of criminals living in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom, who were actively subjected to violence by users of the site, were rescued as a result of the operation.

The administrator and creator of Welcome to Video, which appeared in 2015, was a 23-year-old South Korean citizen Jong Woo Son. He is currently imprisoned in South Korea, where he is already serving a lengthy prison sentence due to his activities, but the corresponding charges on nine counts (including distributing images of child sexual abuse and money laundering) are now brought against him and law enforcement officers from the United States.

Investigators write that Welcome to Video was one of the first sites on the darknet to monetize the sexual exploitation of children using bitcoin. Each user of the site received a unique bitcoin address when creating an account. According to law enforcement estimates, about a million of these wallets were associated with the site. Users either paid 0.03 bitcoin for the rights to download content, or made money by uploading new materials to the site. During the period from June 2015 to March 2018 (it was then that the resource was closed), $ 370,000 in cryptocurrency passed through the site.

It is worth noting that the investigators were in luck: for a short period of time, the Welcome to Video server was incorrectly configured, which revealed several public IP addresses associated with the site. But the investigation was also helped by the above-mentioned bitcoin wallets and cryptocurrency transactions, which were studied by the agents of the US Internal Revenue Service involved in the case. In this they were helped by the tools of the Chainalysis company, designed to analyze blockchain transactions and determine their participants. Previously, Chainalysis specialists helped the authorities investigate the activities of the now defunct and notorious BTC-e exchange, through which money was laundered.

Law enforcement cites the shutdown of Welcome to Video as one of the largest and most heinous operations of its kind. “Operators of anonymization services like Tor should ask themselves if they are doing enough to protect children and make their platform unusable for criminals,” said US Deputy Attorney General Richard Downing.