© Getty Images/iStockphoto
The French court on Friday charged a 64-year-old pensioner on suspicion of setting up and managing a global child pornography platform on the dark web. The man is also suspected of contacting several teenage girls in Belgium and Germany online.
“This is the first child pornography platform on the darknet that has been dismantled in France,” the public prosecutor’s office said. The man, who was arrested on Tuesday in Strasbourg, is accused of “operating an online platform for the illegal transaction, possession, distribution, recording and storage of images of minors of a child pornographic nature”.
According to a source close to the investigation, ten computers and two hundred hard drives were seized from the man’s home. The pensioner was identified thanks to “international cooperation, in particular with Europol, which made it possible to discover the real identity of the person hiding behind pseudonyms on exchange platforms on Tor”, a darknet network. The man is also said to have committed crimes in his immediate environment.
He is also suspected of contacting “several teenage girls online, mainly in Belgium and Germany”.