Sweetie infiltrated on the Deep Web

Sweetie is the software create in Holland, it poses as a 10-years-old girl online and acts as bait to attract hidden pedophiles in the darkest corners the online universe, also known as the deep web.

The bait software attracts pedophiles hidden on the deep web and extracts their information: location, age, and likes. Thanks to this tool, more than 20,000 pedophiles in 71 countries have been identified.

Infiltrating on the Deep Web

Some other methods used are infiltrating police officers in some areas of the Internet to act as bait to dismantle pedophile networks.

It is an indicative of the necessity of police services to be one step ahead with the new technological methods like artificial intelligence and  software, which together turns the infiltrated as part of the game by creating a reliable enough fake profile to pose a normal user.

After that, the police officer must earn the criminal’s trust, a process that can take months since it is a very complicated step. The result of these actions are closing pedophilia networks on the deep web, committing the following crimes:

• Production and distribution of child pornography
• Human trafficking

Online crimes can go from informatics, financial to trafficking illegal substances, thus giving several options to tackle each one.

Huge Operations

Operations against pedophilia networks like Childhood Light, and under international coordination (Equator, Panama, USA, Brazil, El Salvador, Chile and Paraguay) managed to do important arrest such as the 36-years-old teacher in possession of pornographic material.

The most recent case was a Whatssapp group arrested, in a joined operation coordinated by Europol, which exchanged pornographic material with pictures of children while being sexually assaulted.

As part of the Europol’s operation, the former Peruvian ambassador in Hungary, Gabor Kaleta, was arrested for being part of a pedophilia network. There were more than 19,000 child pornography files in a computer the diplomat had.

In addition, 16 Peruvian members of a group known as Extreme Children Porn Peru were arrested. Every day, material of sexually abused children was shared in this group. Authorities discovered one worker of the Jail National Institute of Peru was part of this group.

The post Technology is used as a Weapon to Fight Pedophilia first appeared on Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit - Official Site.

Childhood Light OP

The charges against the doctor come after an investigation originating from an international OP named Childhood Light, which was born after the U.S.’s Homeland Security alerted Brazil’s government about a group of users that shared a single IP.

The pediatrician was detected though the eMule software, a P2P service that allows users to share files, which was monitored by the police’s CyberCrimes Against Children and Teenagers division.

The material was reviewed with a software that can recognize places and spatial dimensions, as well as identify the faces of criminals, even though small changes. The Mobile Computer Lab van was parked outside the doctor’s office and left to run forensic software which was later used to create a digital register in the crime scene.

During the investigation, documents from two of the doctor’s computers were confiscated and later found to contain notes on the patients. While the defense argues that some of the photographs were made in the doctor’s office, they are still considered to be abuse since they were taken without the doctor’s permission.

The tech was used with the purpose of determining the exact location where the pictures were taken and to confirm the places where the pediatrician took the pictures of naked children.

During the arrest process, the confiscated computers showed over 800 images and 70 videos which show minors, aged between 6 months old and 14 years old, being abused. Between January 8 and 12 of 2018, the pediatrician took 39 pictures of girls on a beach. Said pictures were found in the memory card of a camera found during a house search of his home.

Pedophilia in the deep web

This case brought back the public’s attention to the dangers of the deep web, considered a world apart from the regular internet and fertile ground for pedophiles to connect with each other and exchange information, pictures and videos trough encrypted messages, shared in private internet forums.

Some careful experts stay away from innovative tools such as Whatsapp and choose private networks (VPNs) which allows them to hide their identities when they surf the web, and access private forums that require memberships.

Common internet contains less than 1% of the information available in the deep web, where pedophilia is just one of the many crimes that occur on a daily basis, yet being part of around 83% of the contents shared though this area of the web.

This means that 4 out of every 5 Tor network users use the web to pedophilic sites, where truly shocking images are shared.

The post Pedophilia in the Deep web first appeared on Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit - Official Site.