Counter Pedophilia Investigate Unit

A jury considering verdicts in the trial of a woman and four men, including one from London, accused of being members of an international paedophile ring, has been sent home to continue its deliberations on Tuesday.

The five defendants, who include a serving soldier, are facing a range of charges at Portsmouth Crown Court including the sexual assault of children and making and distributing indecent photos of children. (more…)

Child abusers and viewers of child sex images on the web will face tough penalties in the European Union, under new rules approved by the European Parliament on October 27 2011.

The legislative resolution was adopted by the European Parliament with 541 votes in favour, two against and 31 abstentions.

The directive will also require EU countries to remove child porn web sites, or, should this prove impossible, allow them to block access to those pages within their territory. (more…)

Beyond the web we use every day there is a lawless underworld of child abuse and black marketeering that is difficult for authorities to investigate, Christopher Williams reports.

A rare shaft of light has shone on one of the darkest corners of the internet in recent days. A latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, it is a place where rape and murder are openly advertised, and earthly authorities appear almost powerless to intervene.

This is the lawless world of darknets and specifically the Hidden Wiki, a site that isn’t on the web, that nobody reaches directly from Google and that can only be accessed using special tools. (more…)

AN alleged pedophile charged with committing 99 sex offences against a young girl, including child prostitution and producing child pornography, has been granted bail.

Richard Paul Baxter, 63, is the third person in three weeks to face court over the eight years of alleged abuse endured by the girl at a property in Brisbane’s southern suburbs, which police say ended only last month.

Mr Baxter was arrested on Monday and charged with 94 counts of indecent treatment of a child, four counts of obtaining prostitution and one count of making child exploitation material since 2004. (more…)

The Anonymous hacking group has posted a list of 1,500 people who it says used a child porn website.

The move comes after the group managed to take down more than 40 pedophile websites last week which were swapping images through the Tor anonymization network.

It all started when Anonymous came across a site hosted on a Tor darknet a couple of weeks ago that linked to images of child sex abuse. (more…)

About a year before a disabled 33-year-old Stagecoach man in 2010 founded a non-profit organization to help handicapped children, federal authorities said he produced his own child pornography with a boy he was babysitting, and shared the images on the Internet.

During an online chat in 2010 with a New York FBI agent — who was posing as a pedophile — Jeremiah Higley wrote he also had sex with minors, according to court records.

The agent had also downloaded dozens of child pornography from Higley’s account. Investigators said the images included Higley performing oral sex on a 6-year-old boy whom he had been babysitting in the home where he lived with his parents. (more…)

CENTRAL POINT, Ore. — Family pictures uploaded using the popular iPhone Application, Photobucket can get stolen and posted to pedophile websites.

April Miller’s husband uploaded 999 family pictures using the application called on his iPhone. Many of the pictures were of their two sons, who are both under the age of 12. Her husband didn’t know he had to click the ‘privacy’ button.

Miller says she knows the pictures had been circulating for at least a few days before she found out. Miller got a text from someone saying they found the pictures of her sons on the Internet. (more…)

A Dutch court has convicted the chairman of a pedophile association of child pornography possession and sentenced him to three years in prison.

Haarlem District Court sentenced Ad van den Berg Tuesday after prosecutors found thousands of photos and films depicting child pornography at his home.

Van den Berg claimed the images and films were for scientific research. (more…)

U.S. authorities say their online portrayal of Ontario as a haven for child-sex tourism helped them catch four predators.

The controversial website set up by the Department of Homeland Security was for the bogus firm Precious Treasure Holiday Co., which promised to arrange illegal encounters in Ontario for pedophiles.

The 19-month-long undercover operation yielded more than 140,000 hits and led to four arrests and convictions, but it has come under criticism on this side of the border because of how Ontario was depicted. (more…)

SANTO DOMINGO. - An Englishman who had been on the lam in Dominican Republic was deported to London to face charges of pedophilia and other crimes against minors, among them pornographic activities using children.

Ralph Brian Baker was whisked out of the country aboard flight Monday from Punta Cana International Airport (east), escorted by Antinarcotics (DNCD) agents and handed over to the Interpol. (more…)