The paedophile lair with 3million snaps of children

THE online lair for predators is cloistered within a photo-sharing website hosted in Russia.

The Irish Daily Mail has decided not to name the site to avoid promoting it.

‘We’ve recently reached a population of 1,020,000 users with a total of 58,000,000 photos uploaded,’ boasts the disturbing site’s home page.

At first glance, it looks like a bona fide site to share photos, and many of users are ordinary people. However, an analysis by cyber-security expert Pat McKenna shows that a large percentage are photos of children.

There are almost 3million snaps of children, and dozens are added every day. Most children’s photos are innocent in themselves. Often they are holiday snapshots of children on the beach, in the playground, or at the swimming pool that have been put online by parents or children themselves.

But many have sexualised titles such as ‘12-13yo Irish cutie’ and ‘sexy Irish 13yo with braces’.

The image search site, which has 21.61million visits per month, is not hidden on the Dark Web, but is easily accessible to everyone on the internet.

Despite a policy of ‘absolutely no child porn’ on the site, child pornography still surfaces, evidenced by multiple arrests over the years.

Although the site has a clear record of hosting child porn, it claims to have rules – namely that standard pornography must be deposited in password-protected folders because the photos could be viewed by minors ‘which is no good’, the site reads.

To see the photos in those collections, users must ask each other for passwords.

Aside from the child porn problem, the site’s users don’t always own the photos they upload, and the people in them don’t always know that images of them are floating around the web without their permission. When contacted by the Mail, the website moderators declined to comment.