A massive dark web child porn site was brought down by tracing bitcoin

Say it with me: Bitcoin is not anonymous.

Three hundred and thirty-seven alleged members of a massive dark web child pornography website were reminded of that fact last year when they were arrested by a global coalition of law enforcement. According to a Department of Justice press release on Wednesday, the individuals in question were tracked down with the help of blockchain analysis.

In other words, authorities were able to trace bitcoin payments made to the site in question back to the alleged perpetrators. That's because, as we can never repeat often enough, contrary to popular belief, bitcoin is only pseudonymous.

"The complaint alleges that law enforcement was able to trace payments of bitcoin to the Darknet site by following the flow of funds on the blockchain," reads the press release. "The virtual currency accounts identified in the complaint were allegedly used by 24 individuals in five countries to fund the website and promote the exploitation of children."

This website, dubbed "Welcome to Video," was reportedly a large operation. The DOJ notes that it discovered over 250,000 unique videos — 45 percent of which "contain new images that have not been previously known to exist" — when it seized the site's server.

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The site's landing page, after it was seized by law enforcement.Credit: screenshot / doj

Those arrested — which include residents of Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington State, and Washington, D.C. among other places — were allegedly buying access to child sexual exploitation videos with bitcoin.

It was also blockchain analysis, the process of analyzing Bitcoin's public ledger to identify patterns and in some cases tie cryptocurrency addresses to real-world names, that allowed law enforcement to locate the server hosting the child-exploitation site in the first place.

"Through the sophisticated tracing of bitcoin transactions," IRS Criminal Investigation chief Don Fort explained in the release, "IRS-CI special agents were able to determine the location of the Darknet server, identify the administrator of the website and ultimately track down the website server’s physical location in South Korea."

A page on the website, before it was taken down, listing prices in bitcoin.Credit: screenshot / doj

That law enforcement is able to identify specific individuals via blockchain analysis is not a new revelation. In a 2018 conversation with Bloomberg, DEA special agent Lilita Infante confirmed that criminals using bitcoin is actually, in her mind, a good thing for that very reason.

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"The blockchain actually gives us a lot of tools to be able to identify people," she observed. "I actually want them to keep using them."

So keep that in mind the next time your friend insists the drugs he ordered off the dark web can never be traced back to him because he paid with cryptocurrency. That, we definitely know, is patently untrue. And, at least in the disturbing case of Welcome to Video, a very good thing.

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