• Tor Onion Service: Operation Round Table (2014). The website shared webcam-captured videos of mostly juvenile boys falsely enticed by the operators of the site to produce sexually explicit material. (more info)
    • Johnson (operator), Devor, Foster, Gaw, Gonzalez-Castillo, Jabbar, Jamieson, Korpal, Saine, Schwab, Zdon, Naim,Thong, Eales.
  • Tor Onion Service: PedoBook, PedoBoard, and TB2 (2015)
    • Cottom (operator), Defoggi, Flanary, Cameron, Austin, MacMillan, Peer, Welch, Huyck, Tidwell, Pierce, Spencer, Diberardino, Moore, Reibert, Smith, Pitman, Sebes.
  • Tor Onion Service: Playpen (2017)
    • More than 150,000 users who actively traded in CSAM.
    • 548 international arrests, with 296 sexually abused children identified or rescued; 25 producers of child pornography prosecuted; 51 hands-on abusers prosecuted
    • Chase, Fluckiger, Browning
  • Tor Onion Service: The Giftbox Exchange (2019)
    • Over 72,000 registered users and 56,000 posts.
    • Falte (sexual abuse of a toddler-aged minor), Faulkner (sexual abuse of a toddler-aged minor), Leslie (sexual abuse and production of child pornography involving multiple children, including an infant and a toddler), Bedusek (child exploitation enterprise); .
  • Tor Onion Service: Welcome to Video (2019)
    • "Rescue of at least 23 minor victims residing in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom, who were being actively abused by the users of the site."
    • Son (convicted in South Korea) and an "additional 337 site users residing in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington State and Washington, D.C. as well as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia have been arrested and charged."
    • Additional defendants charged and convicted in the District of Columbia include Stengel, Wunderlich, Wagner, Miller, DeJournett, LaPrath, and Ezeagbor.
  • Tor Onion Service: Elysium 89,000 members. "The suspected ringleader, a 39-year-old man, was arrested in the state of Hesse. The forum was also used to make appointments to abuse children. Police seized the website's server. They found that toddlers were among the children sexually abused, reports say."
  • Tor Onion Service: Unnamed
    • "30,000 members, who were required to share illicit child pornography images in order to gain and keep membership, including numerous child pornography producers who were actively abusing children, according to the government’s memorandum."
    • Delalio, Gmoser, Davis, Martin, Hoff
  • Tor Onion service KidFlix and Operation Stream: "Operation Stream started in 2022 and has so far led to 79 arrests, 1,393 suspects identified, and over 3,000 electronic devices seized between March 10 and March 23, 2025." "Following an extensive German investigation, the Child Pornography and Child Sex Tourism Team (TBKK) of the National Investigation and Intervention Unit (LO) took the child pornography dark web platform KidFlix offline on March 11, 2025. KidFlix was an online platform that offered child pornography. Over 1.8 million users logged into the platform worldwide. For a fee, they could download videos that showed sexual abuse of children. Users could also stream videos and offer new videos themselves."
  • Operation Grayskull Culminates in Lengthy Sentences for Managers of Dark Web Site Dedicated to Sexual Exploitation Operation Grayskull resulted in the dismantling of a total of four sites dedicated to images and videos depicting child sexual abuse. These websites were some of the most egregious on the dark web, and they included sections specifically dedicated to infants and toddlers, as well as depictions of violence, sadism, and torture. (Rosenstein, Garrell, Boyles, Good, Spearman, Martin, Stewart, McIntosh)

Individual Cases

2014

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2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

2026

  • Global cybercrime crackdown: over 373,000 dark web sites shut down. "On 9 March 2026, a global operation led by German authorities and supported by Europol was launched against one of the largest networks of fraudulent platforms in the dark web. The investigation began in mid-2021 against the dark web platform “Alice with Violence CP”. During the investigation, authorities discovered that the platform’s operator was running more than 373 000 fraudulent websites advertising child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings. ... However, not a single customer received what they were paying for. Neither the CSAM packages – priced between €17 and €215 – nor the CaaS services were real."