German police hunt 12,000 strong child abuse ring

German investigators are attempting to identifying participants in a massive online child sex abuse network reckoned to have involved 12,000 people. The investigation into what's thought to be the largest such network centered on Germany has also identified suspects in approximately 70 other countries. The suspects include 300 …

[Anonymous Coward]

lets just hope

They do it properly and dont release any names until credit card fraud has been ruled out. The last time this thing happened it ruined many lives due to crappy investigating.

[Anonymous Coward]

Operation Ore #2

Having been a victim of the ORE outrage, I still find it

unbelievable that the police did "NO" investigation what-so-ever.

My credit card was used in 1999 by somebody in Europe

The IP address associated with the transaction was not in the

UK Range.

I now have a complete copy of the UK Landslide Database, it is so easy

to spot the cc frauds.

In the US only a handful of perple were arrested and charged, in the UK

7200 people were targeted.

Hey El-Reg if you want a copy give me a call

[Gerrit Tijhof]

How 12000?

How the figure of 12000? Unique ip-addresses? Creditcards? Login-databases?

[leslie]

@dave

Not to mention open wifi........ the media always make a point that a child pornographer may be stealing your wifi for hi dubious perversion, but what if a wifi stealer is accidentally stealing wifi from a child pornographer etc....

Interesting thought, steal wifi, get locked up for child porn, what a deterrent!

[Rick Brasche]

"Will somebody thino of the CHILDREN?"

sure, child porn and abuse is disgusting and vile (unless your Michael Jackson or rich royalty in Dubai) but it's fascinating how it can be used as an excuse to violate civil rights and laws around the world.

hell, child porn and copyright seem to be the only two things law enforcement can actually arrest people for. Murder, treason, fraud, racketeering, electioneering-these take extreme effort to even start an investigation, much less actually get concerted effort and media cooperation to resolve. Not even "National Security" (capitalized for Importance) gets as much concerted effort to wipe out not only the perpetrators, but also is forgiven any amount of 'collateral damage".

Give it a couple of years, and it'll just be Copyright. Hollywood, "cultural Elite", and Europe's worst have been working real hard to make sure the sexualization of ever younger children becomes more and more "acceptable" and legal. Kill, rape, steal, defraud, intimidate-no problem, that's par for the course in certain prominent Political Families. But violate a copyright...and see evils committed by the RIAA that makes Inquisitors look like squeamish amateurs.

Read "Noir" by K.W. Jeter for terrifying inspiration on copyright enforcement.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering,

that one of the largest credit card gateways generally used by adult sites here in US has been compromised for some time now it seems likely they will drag more than one poor shmuck through the mud who never even heard of the site and who never had anything to do with child pornography.

http://www.icwt.us/index.php/2007/12/23/tens-of-thousands-of-adult-website-records-compromised/

Good god what a mess this could end up being.

[Shannon Jacobs]

A supersecret conspiracy of 12,000?

Not denying that there are more than 12,000 seriously deranged people out there, but I'm really hard-pressed to imagine that this could have been much of a secret. If the 'authorities' had wanted to, it would seem they easily could have nipped this in the bud way before that.

As regards the actual problem, my own feeling is that anyone who is turned on by child pornography is mentally sick to the degree where treatment should be strongly required. Anyone who sells it for profit should spend a few years in jail. The worst case criminals who actually make it should spend MANY years in jail. That would seem to be sufficient to deal with the problem, even if there's some squabbling about the details.

By the way, the icon is because I don't regard this as much of an IT topic. In philosophic terms, this is an easy form of evil to recognize, and the tools (IT tools in this case) remain philosophically neutral.

[Anonymous Coward]

In six months time..

There could be 25,000,000 UK citizens being investigated!

[Matt Bryant]

But whatever happens....

...even if they have missing children still out there, or it might help stop other poor kids getting abused, in no way at all would it ever be acceptable to take one of this misunderstood individuals and subject them to the horrors of waterboarding in the hope of gaining information!

/Keith T mode off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Paedophile story = disengage eyeballs to brain link

Quite few of the previous comments waffle on about mis-used credit card details when the article makes no mention of using such records to identify anyone. If you bothered to read the article it says the alleged offenders were identified by suspicious traffic flowing through an ISPs network which was further analyzed, sod all to do with credit cards.

Oh and I'm still waiting for the namby pamby wally who will say that this investigation is a waste of polic resources and the money it costs could be better spent helping starving children in the third world.

[heystoopid]

Do the maths

Do the maths based upon total Internet users/ computers in use/sold the figures across 70 countries would indicate the infected persons with this illness would not even be close to 1 in 100,000 users on line at any one time !

Strange is it not the common garden variety motor car kills 1.2 million and maims another 12 million for life annually in the world we live in! Yet no call to ban these weapons of mass destruction from all roads but just up the fines paid by the drivers instead !

The gun kills another 3.5 million world wide but the only calls you hear are the police want bigger and better military grade assault weapons to defend themselves and then routinely exonerate themselves when they shoot the innocent bystanders , civilians on the other hand for the same crime are either executed of jailed for long terms !

We are fed that much propaganda in this new century yet no one including reporters question the numbers that authority figures dish out with out a pause to cover both their fellow colleagues evil deeds other assorted tracks and equally push hidden agendas from prying eyes as well ! The MET tried to do so recently over one very questionable shooting and almost got away with it if it wasn't for those pesky whistle blowers !

How sad it is that many silly people blindly take these figures as absolute gospel and appear to be unable to look behind the veil of misinformation when the the word child is included in the sentence. By using such a word you can thus stampede the fools in the direction you want , truly evil indeed !

But then again if I did a full complete tax audit on the entire German Police Force and trolled all their bank accounts and storage areas I would probably uncover ten times that number guilty of some transgression of the local laws !

[umacf24]

I've always wondered....

... what percentage of the raw Operation Ore card list were held in female names?

I'm not afraid to generalise and say that women don't buy child pornography online, so there ought to be none. So if the list had W% female names (I don't know, say 10% for an example), and the proportion of all payment cards held by women is W (it can't be far off 1/2) then the percentage due to fraud can be estimated:

(1/W) * F which would be 20% for the example numbers above.

I'm fairly happy with W at 50%, but the question is F.

So: Operation Ore insiders: what's F? What percentage of the raw card list was held in female names?

[amanfromMars]

@Paedophile story = disengage eyeballs to brain link

A World of Complete Blackness would do exactly the Same, Chris W, without the permanent distortion. The Demons in the Dark will then be theirs to Confront and Vanquish for Light Speed Work.

The Mint 42 Pay ITs Way. A Very Prudent Move/Opening Gambit/Quantum Leap into AI Colossus of a Total Information Awareness Station. ...... Free42AIResearch and dDevelopment ....... XXXXotic Erobotics ....... Pleasure NIRobotIQs, Joie de Vivre, Red Zone

[Paul Young]

@umacf24 UK Value of F

From the list I have covering the UK there are approx 25 female names

only 7 of which had valid cc details authorised.

I wonder if they got raided?

This is approximate as trawling through 7200 names isn't easy

The number of MP's is interesting and some look like real transactions

[umacf24]

@Paul Young UK Value of F

That's the sort of proportion (male:female 288:1) I would expect from real users of a porn site.

So that list has either had fraud removed already, or any remaining fraudulent names were obtained from site of an exclusively male interest (and I don't mean Machine Mart). It casts some doubt on Duncan Campbell's claim (http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2059880,00.html) that many of the Ore names are cases of credit card fraud.

Can you say where you got the list?

[William Tell]

Not exactly 12,000 criminals, but a welcome headline to politicians anyway

Most of the many thousand web users didn't participate in a "child sex abuse network" – they surfed to a website primarily dedicated to legal teen and Lolita porn, according to the opinion of this lawyer's German blog entry:

http://www.lawblog.de/index.php/archives/2007/12/25/vom-himmel-in-die-holle

The majority of these 12,000 suspects didn't search for child abuse and a significant portion of them didn't even download illegal files. They were caught through their IPs. Bottom line: Don't look at porn websites at all, they may be some illegal content somewhere on the site and in this case, it raises enough suspicion for German prosecutors.

Many questions are still unanswered – Who was the provider from Berlin that noticed the illegal activities, and was it really by noticeable bandwidth consumption? How many of these 12,000 are still being prosecuted - probably not all. How many will be accused and how many will be found guilty?

IT privacy significantly decreases in Germany. I wonder if a success story like this one will convince the Germans that not their privacy but the child molestor's is at stake.

[Charlie]

@umacf24

What's the point of making any kind of extrapolation when your initial assumption is ridiculous? You might as well say that people called Brian never buy child porn, so the number of people called Brian in the list gives us a good indicator of the level of fraud! Unless you have hard data - and given the wording you use you don't, everything you say is worthless assumption - then why bother?

@Rick Brasche

"Not even "National Security" (capitalized for Importance) gets as much concerted effort to wipe out not only the perpetrators, but also is forgiven any amount of 'collateral damage"."

What about Guantanamo? While neither is an attractive prospect, i'd rather be inaccurately listed as a sex offender than abducted and tortured for doing nothing.