Law enforcement agencies in the United States and South Korea have closed the largest darknet market for child pornography, through which more than 1 million videos have been distributed. Calculations on it were made in bitcoins.

South Korean National and Hundreds of Others Charged Worldwide in the Takedown of the Largest Darknet Child Pornography Website, Which was Funded by Bitcoin https://t.co/jW7ZHheJD9 pic.twitter.com/IBJvyuDO26

– Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept) October 16, 2019

The alleged site administrator is a 23-year-old South Korean citizen, Chung Woo Song, who is currently serving an 18-month sentence in his homeland. In the US, he was also charged.

Son Indictment 0 by BlockchainJournal on Scribd

Since March 2018, during the international operation, 337 users of the site from the UK (38), Brazil, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the UAE have been detained.

Law enforcers released 23 victims of sexual violence in the United States, Britain and Spain. They were exploited to produce illegal content on a regular basis. All of them were minors.

“What we are discussing today is the sexual exploitation of children is one of the worst forms of evil ever created by humans ,” said Jesse Lou, District of Columbia Attorney.

Darknet Market was in effect from June 2015 until March 2018. The servers, according to the US Department of Justice, were located in Wu Son’s apartment. During this time, the number of detected cases of storage, production and distribution of child pornography increased from 1.1 million (2014) to 18.4 million (2018).

Data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

Law enforcement authorities discovered 250 thousand unique videos on the site, of which 45% contained images that had not previously been placed at the disposal of the authorities.

A VIP account for unlimited download for six months cost 0.03 BTC (in March 2018). Payment was proposed to be made through several cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase, BTC-e and Bitfinex.

US Department of Justice data

The Ministry of Justice revealed the names of dozens of users of the site who have been charged. Among them were employees of federal law enforcement agencies.

The two suspects have already committed suicide after they were put on the wanted list.

Law enforcement officers helped track Bitcoin transactions to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

“The ability of our department to analyze blockchain and deanonymize bitcoin transactions has already allowed hundreds of criminals to be detected around the world,” the IRS emphasized.

Recall that this year, as part of international operations, law enforcement agencies partially or completely closed the following darknet markets and enterprises:

The largest darknet drug market, Dream Market, ceased operations in the spring for unknown reasons.

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