Cases and Documents

W. Bleyle worked in the long-term convalescent facility at the Children’s Hospital and Health Center of San Diego for 25 years. Children in this facility cannot feed or bathe themselves. Bleyle confessed to molesting about two children each week. He “specifically chose children who were the most brain-damaged, most comatose, most nonverbal — children who could never say anything about it” [5, 6]. During an interview with law enforcement, Bleyle compared the number of victims he raped to the number of snowflakes in a snowfall. Bleyle was caught by investigators not due to reports by hospital staff or victims, or to a CyberTip; he was caught by an investigation of his use of a P2P file-sharing program.

R. Belden [216, 219] pleaded guilty to knowingly receiving and possessing CSAM and was sentenced by a court to 35 years in prison. He was in possession of 57 terabytes (TB) of CSAM across 15 hard drives. His CSAM collection contained depictions of toddlers and sadistic abuse, and his sentence was higher than the 20-year term more typical for his crimes due to his “history and characteristics, and nature and circumstances of his offense.” He was caught by an investigation of his use of a P2P file-sharing program

Tor onion services are used widely as the basis of anonymous websites and anonymous messaging clients. For example, TorChat is a prominent Tor-based messaging client and is used for child exploitation. One individual engaged in child sexual exploitation used TorChat to send images of his vaginal and anal rape of a 7-year-old child [241]. The recipient stored the content on Yahoo servers, and Yahoo reported the incident to NCMEC. Agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security executed a search warrant at the home of the images’ sender, where they found numerous videos documenting his rape of the victim over a period of many years, and hundreds of additional CSAM images and video. Tor onion services were reportedly used by an Australian person convicted for sexually and sadistically abusing an 18-month-old girl, among other victims, and streaming the video to paying clients [296, 416, 295].

Group 1 (“Base Group”) This conspiracy involved at least 14 persons8 convicted of sexually exploiting over 1,600 minors from 2012 to 2014, some as young as 8 years old [45]. Fewer than 400 of the minors have been identified, demonstrating the difficulty of identifying victims. None of the 14 convicted individuals had a prior criminal record; some of them had been working alone to exploit minors on these sites for a decade prior, before banding together [334]. Court records describe the scheme as follows. The convicted individuals made use of Chateen. com [28] and “Website B” (the name has not been revealed in unsealed court documents). Unlike other popular social media sites, Chateen.com and Website B were not moderated by their commercial platform owners, so luring minors to the sites enabled the individuals to evade detection. Court documents discussed the methods of the group members, who organized themselves and victims on the two sites, as follows: Members of [Chateen.com] and Website B scoured social media and video-sharing sites popular with children and young teenagers to try to meet them and lure them to [Chateen.com] and Website B. Members engaged in “linking” to lure minor victims by generating and posting a link which — if clicked — took the minor victim into a chat room on [Chateen.com] or Website B [38]. The sites referenced above included Google’s YouTube [45, 28] as well as Musical.ly (TikTok), YouNow, and MyLOL [334]. Court documents detail the techniques used by the group [38] as follows: Members often used deception to persuade, induce, entice, and coerce the minor victim into producing and transmitting sexually explicit videos of themselves. While text-chatting with the minor in real-time, some members posed as minors themselves and simultaneously streamed pre-recorded video of child pornography captured by web camera (these videos were called “loops”) to trick the minor victim into engaging in sexually explicit behavior on web camera as well. The unwitting minor victim did not know that the video that they transmitted on the site was being watched in realtime by multiple “upgraded” users of the sites or was being recorded and would be available for select users to download and view later. In other words, members of this group groomed victims by appearing as a fellow child, often as a boy to girl victims, to gain their trust. They presented their chatrooms on Chateen.com and Website B as places for kids only, away from adults and without rules. They spoke for hours or weeks to gain the trust of a victim. To pose as a child, they played videos of previous victims. They would then “dare” victims to do something “wild,” a sexual act. They would show a video of the previous victim doing a sexual act, and tell the current victim to do the same. The group members engaged in this abuse coordinated in the same chat to ensure that the loops seemed real and that the sexual behavior was normalized to the victim. They would ignore victims who did not comply and lavish praise on those who did. They would pit victims against one another, awarding points in games of sexual abuse. They gathered thousands of videos of victims being exploited sexually. Videos were distributed outside of the group on places such as Mega.nz [334].