They dismantle one of the world’s largest child pornography forums: it had 400,000 members

With the arrest of four German suspects, one of whom was in hiding in Paraguay, German police announced on Monday the dismantling of one of the biggest child pornography networks of the world.

The dismantling of the “Boystown” platform, which had existed on the deep web since 2019 and which had more than 400,000 members, occurred in mid-April and four suspects were arrested, according to a police statement.

The “deep web” refers to the collection of websites and web pages and databases that regular search engines, such as Google, Mozilla Firefox and others cannot find and therefore do not index in their engines. . It is used for trafficking in drugs, weapons and child pornography.

“The platform had an international reach and it was used for the exchange of child pornography between its members ”, specifies the press release published by the AFP agency.

Among the contents, which videos and photos included, contained “images of serious sexual abuse of very young children,” police said.

Four Germans Arrested

Three Germans were arrested in their country after an investigation of several months by a special unit of the German police, under the coordination of the European Police Office (Europol) and with the collaboration of the Dutch, Swedish, Australian, American and Canadian police forces.

A fourth suspect, also German, was arrested in Paraguay – where he lives – at the request of the Berlin authorities. An international arrest warrant has weighed on this man, for whom he may be handed over to the German authorities in the coming days.

Three of the inmates, 40, 49 and 58 years old, are suspected of “having been the administrators of the child pornography platform”. In addition to taking charge of network management, they also did “customer monitoring,” police said.

Eva Kühne-Hörmann, Minister of Justice for the German region of Hesse, described the operation as “a fantastic success in the fight against sexual violence against minors”.

In recent years, Germany has dismantled several of these criminal networks.

Source agencies

AFG