Darknet Child Abuse Platform Boystown With 400k Users Busted, 4 Arrested

One of Europe's notorious child sex abuse platforms known as "Boystown" was taken down by an international task force set up by the German Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt). Four men were arrested from four different bust operations, one of them in Paraguay. More than 400,000 registered users were found to be accessing the darknet platform.

Three of the arrests were made in Germany while the other one was in Paraguay. All of the arrested people played various roles in running the child abuse site, according to Europol.

The task force consisted of various European bodies including the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) itself and other law enforcement agencies from the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the United States of America.

According to CNN, three main suspects who were connected to the operation and maintaining the platform included a 40-year old who was arrested in the German city of Paderborn, a 49-year old man who was arrested in Munich, and a 64-year old man who was arrested in Hamburg.

The other suspect was a 58-year old man who was arrested in Paraguay. He was also said to be one of the site’s most active users, being a member since 2019, and posted more than 3,500 times.

BBC reported that one of the “pedophiles," who was arrested outside Germany, has been already living in South America for some years. He is now under the custody of Paraguay’s Concepción region under an international arrest warrant while waiting to be handed over to the German authorities.

Meanwhile, Europol said that the image and video data that they got during the investigation will be used in their “Victim Identification” taskforces regularly. They also claimed that more arrests and rescues will be expected globally after sending out these “intelligence packages” to police and authorities all over the world.

A “darknet” is an overlay network within the traditional internet that can only be accessed through specific software, configurations, and most of the time uses a special and customized communication protocol. In other words, these pages cannot be found using a conventional search engine such as Google. Platforms that can be found inside are not limited to abusive materials containing child porn but also other horrifying stuff that you can never think of.