Australian Police Ran World’s Biggest Child Porn Site for a Year in Massive Sting

A very controversial procedure which I support but for a concern about where they get their original child porn needed to maintain their masquerade. If they got it from seized material, I'm sort of OK with that, but if they had to produce it from scratch then that's a big problem

© QueenslandPolice / YouTube

Task Force Argos, a Queensland police unit, took over ‘Childs Play,’ the world’s biggest child porn exchange, between October 2016 and September 2017, and impersonated the administrators – even posting images themselves – in a bid to catch pedophiles.

“We don’t create these sites. We do not want them to exist. When we do find them, we infiltrate and get as high as possible in the networks administrative structure to destroy it. But we will never create a forum for child sex offenders,” Jon Rouse, the head of Task Force Argos, which led an operation jointly conducted by the US, Canadian, and European authorities, said in an interview with Norwegian newspaper VG, which investigated and broke the story.

“Our job is to make sure we play at the same level as the abusers. If we don’t, they will always be one step ahead,” added Rouse.

‘Childs Play’ appeared in April 2016 on the dark web – an anonymized part of the internet – with the identities of its operators and the location of its servers concealed, offering its equally anonymous users a feeling of security while posting not only images of child abuse, but underage torture videos and other extreme material.

The police had identified the administrators of the site – its creator, Canadian Benjamin Faulkner, and his associate, American Patrick Falte – but the real breakthrough came after the arrest of the two men in October 2016. The men, now aged 27, had met up and raped a four-year old girl provided by another site user in the state of Virginia. They have since been sentenced to life behind bars.

- A link to this story can be found here

After capturing the pedophiles, officers made them hand over their passwords and other means of administering the site.

“Once you have control of the site, you can do whatever you want. Then you can move it wherever you want in the world,” said Paul Griffiths, one of the lead investigators.

The content of the site had been stored on servers of unnamed European countries, but control of the investigation, termed Operation Artemis, were turned to Task Force Argos. Founded in 1997, the unit, which specializes in underage exploitation online, not only had experience of previous stings, but also took advantage of Australian laws which allow police to engage in criminal behavior to catch child predators.

The task force copied the content of 'Childs Play' to an Australian server, and began posting under the identities of the administrators. One of the established means of showing that the website had not been infiltrated was a monthly post of explicit underage content by the administrators – something police in several countries were not allowed to do, even if they had acquired the handles. But this was no obstacle to Task Force Argos, whose officers posted images to prove their credibility.

Under police control, 'Childs Play' flourished. The number of registered accounts doubled in 2017 alone, while the number of posts with pornographic pictures tripled during their 11 months in charge.

But officers told VG that they had homed in on the tens of thousands of active, regular users, and even more importantly, on the 100 or so producers of underage porn, who posted their own original content.

Their operation was nearly derailed by VG itself. The newspaper had begun its own investigation of 'Childs Play', and managed to figure out that the servers were located in Australia and run by the police. While the journalists raised a number of ethical questions with Task Force Argos about officers operating illegal, and posting images of child abuse, they agreed to hold off publishing until the investigation was complete.

On September 13, 2017, Childs Play went offline. Australian police say they have evidence for implicating up to 90 forum members, and information has been sent out to teams around the world, with one country working through a list of 900 people they believe should be prosecuted.

Despite controversy, including from a parent who said her child was used as “bait,” Task Force Argos says it will persist with similar stings.

“Our team, and units like ours across the world are singularly focused on stopping the sexual abuse of children and we will continue to work together to infiltrate, disrupt and dismantle child sex offender networks like this one,” Rouse said.

Argos could have taken Child's Play down a year ago, but another would have sprung up in its place in months. Better to catch hundreds of pedophiles in the act of distributing child porn, and putting fear into the hearts of thousands more. Removing the cloak of anonymity from the dark web is a huge step against child porn and consequently child sex abuse. Good work Argos.

Children as Young as Two Rescued from Philippine Cybersex Abuse Dens

Lindsay Murdoch 

Bangkok: A mother has been arrested in the Philippines after she allegedly spent five years sending sexually explicit images of her two daughters to an Australian paedophile in the country's booming cybersex industry.

The youngest daughter was only 10 when Stephen James Sheriff, 46, of Cairns, started sending money to her mother in Mandaue City on the Philippine island of Cebu.

Nine months after Sheriff was arrested by the Queensland Police's ARGOS Child Abuse and Sexual Crime Group, Philippine police burst into the mother's house on May 27 and allegedly caught her live-streaming her now 15-year-old daughter performing sex acts for another paedophile.

The girl told Philippine journalists she had been praying for the abuse to stop.

Thank You, Lord, for answering that prayer!

In a separate case three days later, police stormed a house in Iligan city, a cybersex hotspot on the island of Mindanao, and allegedly caught five people in the act of live-streaming the sexual abuse of children aged two, six, eight and 15.

The suspects include the mother one of the children.

General Liborio Carabbacan, of the Philippine police's Women and Children Protection Centre, said forensic examination of electronic devices seized from the house would help identify "multiple foreign perpetrators" – possibly Australians - who allegedly purchased child exploitation images and video from the suspects.

"Such information will be shared with international law enforcement," she said.

The mother arrested in the Cebu case faces charges including child abuse, human trafficking and cyber crime. She could be sentenced to life imprisonment if convicted.

Several people were arrested in connection with the raid in Illigan Mindanao. Photo: WCPC-MFU

The five suspects aged 15, 18, 22, 25, and 43 in the Iligan City case face similar charges.

Fairfax Media understands the Australian Federal Police and members of the ARGOS task force have identified other Australians who have bought view-on-demand child sex and abuse videos and images from the Philippines, as investigators work to expose dark web operators in the country, one of Asia's poorest.

Fairfax Media revealed in early May the AFP had played a key role in the rescue of three sisters aged eight, nine and 12 in Bacolod City, 720 kilometres south of Manila. Another Queensland man was arrested in connection with that operation.

On April 20, Philippine authorities, acting on an overseas tip, uncovered a major live-streaming child abuse and torture syndicate linked to predators in Australia, Canada and Europe, arresting 53-year-old American David Timothy Deakin.

Six children aged between two to 18 were rescued.

Authorities seized a mobile HD tablet containing more than 4000 contacts, numerous computers and hard drives.

Jon Rouse, head of the ARGOS task-force, described the behaviour of Sheriff, who has been convicted in Cairns District Court on eight counts relating to the exploitation of children, as "despicable".

"Sheriff may as well have been in the room with the kids. The fact he was seeing it in the virtual world is irrelevant…what happened to those kids happened because of him," he said.

Sheriff was sentenced to less than three years in prison.

That's just wrong. Live-streamed child sex abuse should be considered the same as if the buyer were the one doing the actual physical abuse. It's not like downloading a video that has been seen dozens or hundreds of times. Each live-stream connection is at least one child being sexually abused. He ought to be put away for 10 years or more, as it is he'll be out doing it again in a couple years. What's the point.

Detective-Inspector Rouse said more cases of child cybersex are being uncovered because of the increasing capabilities of law enforcement agencies, including in tracing financial transactions.

"We are detecting it more because we are looking for it more," he said, adding that Australians have been known to be involved in the online sexual exploitation of children for almost a decade.

Asked whether the involvement of Australians was growing, Detective-Inspector Rouse said "it is already quite an established market".

The International Justice Mission (IJM) helped rescue 201 children who were forced to participate in online sexual exploitation between 2011 to May 2017.

More than half of the victims were under 12 and 70 per cent involved parents, relatives or close family friends of the victims.

Evelyn Pingul, IJM's director of communications in the Philippines, said the alarm needs to be sounded that online sexual exploitation of children has become an epidemic in the Philippines.

"We need the police to continue rescuing these children, we need the prosecution to continue convicting more sick criminals," she said.

IJM's National Director Samson Inocencio called for law enforcement agencies to be given more resources "to fight this horrific crime against children".

"We also need to have specialised after-care models to address the restoration of these young survivors," he said.

Thank you IJM for the great work that you do. God bless you.

Rescued children are usually placed in the care of government child welfare agencies.

Scores of Children Saved, Perverts Arrested

Secret 'dark net' operation saves scores of children from abuse; ringleader Shannon McCoole behind bars after police take over child porn site

By the ABC News Australia
National Reporting Team's 
Mark Willacy

Scores of children have been saved from abuse after an elaborate sting by Queensland Police led to the identification and arrest of key members of a global online sex abuse network.

The 10-month operation led to the arrests of members in Australia and around the world.

Investigators say it identified and saved "potentially hundreds" of children who were being abused.

Queensland's anti-paedophile taskforce Argos targeted an internet bulletin board which had 45,000 members.

Users were ranked according to the volume and originality of the child exploitation material they uploaded to the site.

The board was hosted on the part of the internet known as the "dark net", which uses encryption software to hide identities and mask people's browsing history.

The site, the name of which remains suppressed by the South Australian District Court, was administered by an anonymous Australian.

He was later unmasked as Adelaide childcare worker Shannon McCoole.

Shannon Grant McCoole was head administrator of a highly sophisticated
1,000-member global child pornography website

This month, the Families SA employee was sentenced to 35 years in jail for sexually abusing at least seven children in his care and for transmitting child pornography on the internet.

McCoole's victims were in state care, and were as young as 18 months old. The oldest was three. The sentencing judge at McCoole's trial described him as "evil and depraved".

He shared images and videos of his abuse of children on the site he administered.

McCoole was arrested last year after a manhunt that involved law enforcement agencies around the world.

Unusual 'hiyas' greeting key to arrests

The key breakthroughs in the case were made by Taskforce Argos which pieced together clues about McCoole's identity by cross-matching an unusual online greeting used by the childcare worker.

"He used [the greeting 'Hiyas'] on messages on the board, as a greeting to other members on the board," Taskforce Argos Victim Identification co-ordinator Paul Griffiths said.

[It was] almost panic stations at that point because he's in a real position of control and access to children that we just can't allow to continue at all

"It sort of stuck in my mind as something that didn't look that common to me. So I focused on that."

Mr Griffiths searched for the greeting online, narrowing down a huge list of its users until he found a Facebook page and a photograph of a Volkswagen four-wheel drive utility.

"[The Facebook page] did point us in the direction of Adelaide," Mr Griffiths said.

"I actually found him asking questions online about how to raise the suspension of his four-wheel drive."

Using the visible registration plate on the 4WD, police came up with a name — Shannon McCoole. Background checks immediately rang alarm bells.

"He was a 32-year-old male. Lived alone, no real relationship or no recent partners from what we've gathered," Detective Brevet Sergeant Stephen Hegarty of SA's Sex Crimes Investigation Branch said.

"He'd immersed himself in child-related work."

"It was evident he was working for Families SA as a family care worker," Mr Griffiths said.

"[It was] almost panic stations at that point because he's in a real position of control and access to children that we just can't allow to continue at all."

McCoole was immediately put under surveillance.

Four days after he was identified, police knocked on his door and arrested him.

Inside they found evidence — including metadata on a camera and a freckle on McCoole's finger matching one in images of abuse — that proved he was the head administrator of the global abuse site and an active sexual abuser of children in his care.

Phase two: assuming control to 'cage the rats'

With McCoole in custody, Queensland's Taskforce Argos then activated phase two of the operation.

"Phase two was to take over the network, assume control of the network, try to identify as many of the key administrators as we could and remove them," Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said.

"Ultimately, you had a child sex offender network that was being administered by police."

We closed membership [of the site]. Nobody gets in. We didn't let any new 

membership come in. Effectively we caged the rats.

Detective Inspector Jon Rouse

But Detective Inspector Rouse said there was no way his team was going to allow the sexual abuse of children to go on.

"We closed membership [of the site]. Nobody gets in. We didn't let any new membership come in. Effectively we caged the rats."

Two officers from Taskforce Argos secretly assumed the online identity of Shannon McCoole, working around the clock for 10 months to dismantle the paedophile ring and identify abusers.

"This wasn't an 8:00am-4:00pm, Monday-to-Friday operation. Even when the guys knocked off work we were all communicating outside work," Detective Inspector Rouse said.

"[Assuming the identity of a child sex offender] can mess with your head. It's not something you want to do for really long protracted periods of time. It's inordinately challenging."

Detective Inspector Rouse said the sting resulted in the identification of paedophiles around the world.

"US, Europe, United Kingdom. [It was] global," he said.

"It's testimony to the work done by the team at Argos to make sure we were working in real time with those [international] agencies to execute search warrants.

"This required us engaging with those targets in real time while law enforcement went through doors. [There were] time zone challenges, but good work by authorities across the world."

The operation has also resulted in the arrests of suspected paedophiles in Australia.

"I won't give specific numbers, but there were several in South Australia, several in Victoria and in Queensland as well," Detective Inspector Rouse said.

But the head of Taskforce Argos said the true success of the sting should not be measured in arrests alone.

"I think in terms of the identification of child victims, that's what it was all about. There were a lot of kids that are in a better place now because of what happened across the globe."

Great work, guys. God bless you.