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The full scale of an investigation into a worldwide paedophile ring has been released by the FBI and Europol after the creator of a child pornography website was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison.
Florida man Steven Chase, 58, was this week sentenced in a North Carolina federal courtroom on multiple child pornography and child exploitation charges, the FBI said.
Officials said he was the creator and lead administrator of child pornography website Playpen, which had more than 150,000 members before it was shut down.
Members uploaded and viewed tens of thousands of postings of young victims, categorised by age, sex and the type of sexual activity involved.
In January 2015, the FBI and the US Department of Justice launched Operation Pacifier in an effort to track down Playpen's thousands of members.
The operation received support from Europol and other law enforcement agencies around the world.
As a result there were 368 arrests or convictions in Europe and 350 in the US, with a total of 870 worldwide, according to information released by the FBI and Europol.
The FBI said 296 sexually abused children were identified or rescued internationally.
Europol's executive director Rob Wainwright called it "one of the most important investigations of online child sexual abuse ever conducted".
Michael Fluckiger, 46, of Indiana, and David Browning, 47, of Kentucky were also identified as administrators of the website and each received 20-year prison terms earlier this year.
The FBI said Chase created Playpen in August 2014 on Tor, an open network on the internet where users can communicate anonymously through "hidden service" websites.
Tor was created by the US Naval Research Laboratory as a means of protecting government communications, US attorney Jill Rose noted in a written response to a motion to have Chase's indictment dismissed.
But she said the network had a downside.
"The Tor network is a haven for criminal activity in general, and the online sexual exploitation of children in particular," she wrote.
The FBI said it became aware of the site after it launched, but Special Agent Dan Alfin said that because of how Tor worked, there was not much agents could do about it.
But in December 2014, agents said Chase slipped up and revealed Playpen's IP address, which was a location in the US.
The mistake was caught by overseas law enforcement, which then informed the FBI.
In launching its own investigation, the FBI learned that the computer server that hosted Playpen was located at a web-hosting facility in North Carolina and that Chase was the administrator of the server, Ms Rose wrote.
Chase was arrested in February 2015, after which the FBI took over the website for two weeks in order to identify its users.
Chase argued through his motion filed in federal court in North Carolina that the FBI's operation of the website amounted to "outrageous government conduct" and that his indictment should be dismissed.
Agent Alfin said the agency used a court-approved network-investigating technique to uncover IP addresses and other information that helped locate and identify users.
Investigators sent more than 1,000 leads to FBI field offices around the country and thousands more to overseas law enforcement agencies.
"It's the same with any criminal violation: as they get smarter, we adapt, we find them," Agent Alfin said.
"It's a cat-and-mouse game, except it's not a game. Kids are being abused, and it's our job to stop that."
Chase lived in a rural-suburban neighbourhood in Naples, Florida
According to public records, he ran an excavation trucking company.
Chase had been charged with crimes in Naples over the years, including battery and possession of a controlled substance, but those charges were dismissed.
AP/ABC
Topics: child-abuse, pornography, law-crime-and-justice, united-states, european-union
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