Assessed case number:Seoul Central District Court (Criminal Department I-I) - 2018NO2855
Brief description of the caseA darknet website called "Welcome to Video", was operated by the defendant (a national of Republic of Korea) between the 8 July 2015 and 4 March 2018 for the purposes of exchanging child sexual abuse material.
Website users were able to reach the posted content through Bitcoin payments or by uploading more content which amounted to particular “points”, enabling acess to more content. Each user was able to create a unique Bitcoin adress when registering to the website, in which an analysis of the server revealed that there were over one million Bitcoin adresses, meaning that the website had capacity for at least one million users.
US law enforcement was able to trace down the Bitcoin transfers to locate the perpetrators adress, located in the Republic of Korea. As a result of a joint operation between the US, UK and Korean law enforcement, the website operator was arrested, seizing approximately 8 terabytes of child sexual exploitation material. The involved law enforcement agencies shared the data from the seized server with law enforcement around the world, resulting in the arrest of 337 individuals in 12 different countries. According to the analysis conducted, approximately 45% of seized videos analyzed were child sexual exploitation material that had not previously identified.