Ontario child-porn probe goes global

TORON TO • Police in Ontario say a yearlong international effort to bust child pornographers has led to dozens of arrests around the world.

“Our project began with one child victim in York Region and through investigation has grown into a significant international project with thousands of potential victims,” Insp. Tim Kelly of York Regional Police said Wednesday.

“The investigation is ongoing and continues to grow with every stone that is overturned.”

The investigation, dubbed Project Hydra, resulted in the arrest of 41 suspects — some as young as 12 — in 17 different countries and more than 100 criminal charges, police revealed. Nineteen male and female victims have been identified thus far, ranging in age from infants to teenagers.

Charges include accessing, possession and distribution of child pornography. Seventeen of the suspects were arrested in Canada.

The investigation started in April 2014, when the Ottawabased National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre told York Regional Police about images of child pornography that were uploaded from a residence in York Region, north of Toronto.

After executing a search warrant at the home, investigators learned that a young person had allegedly uploaded the images.

“The young person advised investigators that they had been chatting, sending and receiving child pornography with unknown people throughout the world via popular socialnetworking websites and private chat rooms,” Kelly said.

“Investigators learned that the young person had been a victim of child exploitation and had been coerced into providing self-exploited images to the unknown people online.”

That finding opened the door to a much larger operation.

Police contacted owners of the website used by the young person and identified suspects around the world who were exchanging child porn through the use of cloud storage.

More than 350 investigative packages — containing screenshots of online chats, child sexual abuse images and locations of suspects — were then distributed to police agencies in 17 different countries to allow forces to take action in their own jurisdictions.

Investigators did not say which social-networking application, in particular, was used to spread images of child exploitation, but listed several email and social-media accounts including one for Vichatter, a live video chat service popular in Russia.

Related investigations include an RCMP probe in New Brunswick involving a 24-yearold male suspect from Moncton with possibly more than 2,000 victims around the world.

According to police, most of the suspects arrested in Project Hydra were located in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

“The abusers appear to be people the victims trusted or online predators that coerced the victim into creating child sexual abuse materials,” Kelly said.