A gigantic child pornography platform dismantled by de-anonymizing bitcoin transactions

The Washington DC prosecutor revealed on October 16 the closing of Welcome to Video, biggest child pornography site that ever existed, operating on the darknet in March 2018. All transactions were made bitcoin. It was run by 23-year-old South Korean Jong Woo Son, who is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence in Korea.

The track of bitcoins raised

Dark's dark reputation is not ready to change. After the cases of drug trafficking, arms trafficking, cryptocriminality plunged a little more into the horror with the traffic of child pornography images.

The figures around the site have something to make you dizzy and especially nausea. Sure Welcome to Video, the name of the site, were discovered hundreds of thousands of pages with over a million content showing children. The investigators said they never saw anything like it.

Active since 2015, the site contained 250,000 unique videos, 45% of which had not been recorded anywhere else. As a classic platform Welcome To Video offered its users to register for free to exchange content between them. Points were offered by adding content, or by referring a new member.

A "VIP" subscription offered, against 328 dollars in bitcoin, 6 months of free download. A user of the site, former US federal agent, would have downloaded more than 50 hours of videos. The investigators recorded 7,300 transactions that would have been processed by the site, for more than $ 730,000.

The investigation was conducted from the United States by the Internal Revenue Service, an old US agency originally charged with enforcing US tax laws. It has an investigative division that is responsible for raising criminal money, and therefore, in our time, cryptocurrencies.

It all started in 2017, when one of the department's agents noticed that the young Korean had misconfigured his site. This blunder allowed the investigators to get his IP address, and go back to him, in his country.

Later, it is by following the bitcoins that the agency managed to locate Jong Woo Son in South Korea in 2018, then users of the site. According to Don Fort, Chief of the Criminal Section of the Internal Revenue Service, " The ability of our agency to analyze blockchain and de-anonymize bitcoin transactions has helped identify hundreds of predators around the world ".

337 arrests in 38 different countries

A total of 337 people were arrested in 38 different countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates … France has not been mentioned yet. At least 23 victims of sexual abuse from users of Welcome To Video were rescued in the United States, United Kingdom and Spain.

The arrest of Jong Woo Son was announced under pseudonym by the Korean police on May 2, 2018. He is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence in Korea for child pornography. He has been indicted for the same charges since August 2018 by the United States. The Washington attorney refused to discuss a possible extradition with the US media.

According to the US National Center for Child Abuse and Exploitation, the number of child pornography incidents has increased from 1.1 million to 18.4 million. Cryptocrime would be directly questioned.