World's largest child porn site was dismantled after bitcoin crawl

A site that hosted child pornography, considered to be one of the largest on the Internet and in the world, closed thanks to the fact that authorities were able to track transactions on blockchain (blockchain), a method used by cryptocurrencies.

The story that took place in 2017 will be revealed in detail in Andy Greenberg's book T racers in the dark: The global hunt of the crime lords of cryptocurrency, which will be released in November 2022, which is in pre-sale, and has begun to be commented on in magazines such as The Wired.

It should be remembered that cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain, a secure, decentralized and public technology. Your database can only be viewed by participants, who have access to all data, and can track every transaction they have made.

That said, the researchers were able to detect a user's or organization's information by tracking the blockchain of the porn site's transactions. They managed to link “millions of accounts”.

The Welcome To Video site was a platform with a vast catalog of child abuse content, where there were photos and videos that were sold in exchange for bitcoins. Chainalysis traced the website's customers' payments from a single address.

At least 8 TB of files, among which there were more than 250 thousand videos, were located and presented as evidence. According to Washington D.C. Federal District Attorney Jessie Liu, several bitcoin payments were tracked through blockchain information, managing to identify the administrator of the pedophilia site, who, they estimate, had been operating since mid-2015.

Much of the content “featured preadolescent children, toddlers, and infants engaging in sexual behavior.” The site administrator carried out transactions with bitcoin, where he used his real name, phone number, and email. As a result, the initial investigation was easy.

The fact is that United States law requires that transactions collect identifying information from customers and verifying their identities. The process is known as KYC, by its acronym in English Know Your Costumer.

The prosecutor explained that some agents had infiltrated the site and made purchases with bitcoins on several occasions to pass as average customers and track payments to identify the digital wallet where they were hosted. Through this process they found a wallet in the name of Jong Woon Soon, alleged administrator of the Welcome To Video platform .

With the follow-up, they found the phone number and email address, which matched Woon Soon's identity. As if that were not enough, they identified a bitcoin transaction to a bank account in their name, with which they were able to confirm that it was linked to the child abuse platform.

As cryptocurrencies are decentralized, users had been confident that blockchains would be impossible to find and did not hesitate to use their real identity in their bitcoin wallets. However, the analyses of the specialists allowed us to see how far the money had gone, including those who had been buying subscriptions to view the content.

After locating those involved in the consumption and sale of child pornography, the authorities succeeded in arresting 337 pedophiles, including the deputy principal of a school in the United States and the husband of a kindergarten director. In the house of one of them they located more than 450,000 hours of video of child abuse.

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