According to the Department of Justice, a now-busted online hub for child pornography had strict instructions for its users: “Do not upload adult porn.”
Welcome to Video, a site which allegedly hosted hundreds of thousands of videos of child sexual exploitation, was the target of a DOJ investigation and takedown announced Wednesday. The U.S. Attorney’s office announced the arrest of more than 300 site users across the world, 53 of which were in the U.S., and charges for a 23-year-old South Korean man, identified as Jong Woo Son, for acting as the site’s administrator. The DOJ called Welcome to Video the world’s “largest dark web child porn marketplace.”
“A message to the pedophiles of the world: You may try to hide behind technology, but we will find you, and we will arrest you,” said U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu. “Today the children of the world are safer.”
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The U.S. Attorney’s office also unveiled a civil forfeiture complaint to recover more than a million dollars of Bitcoin used to purchase videos from Welcome to Video. The DOJ seized 200,000 videos of children, toddlers, and infants that comprised roughly 8 terabytes of data. The site operated from June 2015 until March 2018, when authorities shut it down.
Son was indicted on nine federal child pornography charges unsealed Wednesday. He is currently serving a prison sentence in South Korea on child pornography charges, and the DOJ declined to comment on the possibility of his extradition.
Liu said 23 child victims across the world had been identified via Welcome to Video materials and rescued from their abusers.
Welcome to Video operated on the dark web via the anonymous Tor network, allegedly charging a $300 annual membership, and allowed users to purchase videos with Bitcoin. Don Fort, chief of IRS criminal investigations, said his agency traced many pedophiles by de-anonymizing Tor browsing data and cryptocurrency transactions. The investigation involved authorities from across the spectrum in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Korea.
Reports of child exploitation are on the rise as more of the world comes online. Technology companies reported 45 million instances of pedophiles sharing sexual images of children in 2018, more than double the year before. Attorney General William Barr has said encryption on messaging platforms poses significant risk of enabling pedophiles to organize and exchange illegal material undetected. Technology companies and privacy advocates stringently oppose his position.
“An increase in reports does correspond to an increase in instances of abuse,” Paul Jenkins, an officer with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, said at the press conference. He went on to say that viewing child exploitation videos online incites pedophiles to abuse children in real life and inspires them to make content to later upload.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington, D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
