Author: Michael Bacina
The US Department of Justice has revealed a massive international operation which has led to the shutdown of a child exploitation website hosting more than 8 terabytes of child pornography, making it one of the largest illegal website shutdowns ever.
The investigation has led to hundreds of arrests over the US, United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia. Further details of the investigation and arrests are available in the unsealed complaint, titled “United States of America v Twenty-four cryptocurrency accounts“.
Known as “Welcome to Video” (WTV), the website was a child pornography marketplace operating out of South Korea that allowed users to buy content with Bitcoin or upload their own content. Users received a unique Bitcoin address when they signed up, which was used to send funds to buy content. More than 1.3 million Bitcoin addresses were associated with the website. Between 2015 and 2018, the website had received over USD$350,000 worth of Bitcoin over thousands of individual transactions.
While this story has been reported on in The Australian (paywall), Daily Telegraph and various other outlets in the mainstream media, almost all references have missed the key point:
this bust would not have been possible without the transparent, immutable register inherent in the Bitcoin blockchain.
In the words of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Chief Don Fort:
“Through the sophisticated tracing of bitcoin transactions, IRS-CI special agents were able to determine the location of the Darknet server, identify the administrator of the website and ultimately track down the website server’s physical location in South Korea”
Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis announced that it was involved with the investigation and identified some of the methods by which they were able to identify the website’s users, and ultimately enable police departments to make arrests.
