A site that hosts child pornography, considered one of the largest on the Internet and in the world, it closed thanks to the fact that the authorities were able to trace blockchain transactions (blockchain), a method used by cryptocurrencies.
The story that occurred in 2017 will be revealed in detail in the book Tracers in the dark: The global hunt of the crime lords of cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg, which will be released in November 2022, which is on pre-sale, and has begun to be commented on in magazines such as The Wired.
It should be remembered that cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain, a secure, decentralized and public technology. Your database can only be seen by the participants, who have access to all the data, and can track every transaction that they have made.
That said, the researchers were able to detect the information of a user or organization by tracing the blockchain of the porn site’s transactions. They managed to link “millions of accounts”.
The place Welcome To Videoit was a platform with a vast catalog of child abuse contentl, where there were photos and videos that They were sold in exchange for bitcoins. Chainalysis traced the website’s customer payments from a single address.
At least 8 TB of files, among which there were more than 250 thousand videos were located and presented as evidence. According to the US District Attorney for Washington DC, Jessie Liu, it is rtracked various bitcoin payments via blockchain informationmanaging to identify the administrator of the pedophilia site, which, they estimate it had been operating since mid-2015.
Much of the contentfeatured pre-teens, toddlers, and infants engaging in sexual conduct.” The site administrator carried out the transactions with bitcoin, where he used his real name, phone number and email. Thanks to this, the initial investigation was simple.
And it is that the Law of the United States requires that for transactions identifying information is collected from customers and their identities are verified. The process is known as KYC, for its acronym in English Know Your Costumer.
The prosecutor explained that some agents had infiltrated the site and made purchases with bitcoins on several occasions to pass as average customers and track payments to identify the digital wallet where they were hosted. Through this process they found a wallet in the name of Jong Woon Soon, alleged administrator of the platform Welcome To Video.
With the follow-up, they found the phone number and email, which matched the identity of Woon Soon. And if that was not enough, identified a bitcoin transaction to a bank account in his name, with which they were able to confirm that he was linked to the child abuse platform.
Since cryptocurrencies are decentralized, users had trusted that blockchains would be untraceable and did not hesitate to use their real identity on their wallets of bitcoins. However, the specialists’ analysis allowed them to see how far the money had gone, including those who had been buying subscriptions to view the content.
After locating those involved in the consumption and sale of child pornography, the authorities managed to arrest of 337 pedophiles, among whom was the deputy principal of a school in the United States and the husband of a director of a daycare center. In the house of one of them they located more than 450 thousand hours of video of child abuse.
KEEP READING:
Why it is not good to charge a phone in the USB port of the car
This Trojan virus steals bank accounts, beware
“Alexa plants a tree”: the phrase to plant trees from the house and help reforest
Source-www.infobae.com