Police take down ‘Kidflix’ child abuse platform, Europol says

AMSTERDAM: Police shut down one of the largest paedophile networks in the world last month in an operation spanning 35 countries, the EU’s law enforcement agency Europol said on Wednesday.

Europol said 79 suspects had been arrested for sharing and distributing child sexual abuse material on a platform known as Kidflix. Some of those arrested are suspected of having abused children themselves, it said.

German and Dutch authorities seized the central server of the platform, which contained 72,000 videos at the time.

Europol said a total of around 91,000 unique videos had been uploaded and shared on the hugely profitable platform, which was created in 2021 and attracted 1.8 million users worldwide in the past three years.

“Unlike other known platforms of this kind, Kidflix not only enabled users to download child sexual abuse material but also to stream video files. Users made payments using cryptocurrencies, which were subsequently converted into tokens,” Europol said.

Users could earn tokens by uploading material, verifying titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos, it added.

Europol said the operation had been the largest ever handled by its experts in fighting child sexual exploitation and one of the biggest cases the agency had supported in recent years.

It said a total of almost 1,400 suspects had been identified, while 39 children were protected through the operation.

ChatGPT usage hits record high as AI-generated Ghibli art goes viral 

Earlier on February 4, German investigators said that they had dismantled a major platform for the distribution of child sex abuse images with 1.8 million users worldwide in an international operation coordinated by Europol.

The move to shut down the “KidFlix” streaming service was “one of the biggest blows against child pornography in recent years, if not ever”, said Guido Limmer, deputy head of the Bavarian criminal police.

The investigation was led by German police and supported by authorities in 38 countries under the coordination of Europol.

In all, “KidFlix” is said to have hosted more than 91,000 videos with images of child sex abuse, totalling around 6,288 hours of film, according to Bavarian police.

Authorities were able to identify almost 1,400 individual users of the platform, which was hosted on the so-called darknet.