Bitcoin tracking operation helped to catch criminal network
An operation to catch the most important cryptocurrency in the world helped to find 338 people who committed crimes of child pornography
An international operation used the tracking of the bitcoin cryptocurrency against child pornography and triggered the arrest of 338 people related to the closed “Welcome To Video” website, accused of integrating the world’s largest network for the exchange of this type of pornography in the Dark Web.
The author of this page, Jong Woo Son, a 23-year-old South Korean citizen, and another 337 people who came from the United States and 11 other countries, including Spain ,were identified despite the anonymity provided by the Dark Web or Dark Internet thanks to the Traceability of the bitcoin cryptocurrency, which the network used in its transactions, as reported by the State Department of Justice in a statement.
Thanks to the use of advanced traceability techniques based on the blockchains that are generated with cryptocurrency transactions, the investigation of the criminal department of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS-CI) of the United States was able to locate the Darknet server used by the pornographic network, located in Korea.
The owner of the website, Son, was arrested in March 2018 in South Korea and the server with which he operated on the Dark Web was requisitioned. The operation resulted in the intervention of approximately eight terabytes (TB) of pornography videos with children, one of the largest seizures of this type of material.
The images, which are currently analyzed by the authorities, contained more than 250,000 videos, and 45% of them contain new images that had not been detected so far.
K. Tovar
Source: La Vanguardia
