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Major International Child Porn Bust Reveals 5 Victims From Dallas

Peter Nissen
/
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
A sanitized screen grab of the child pornography website on the Darknet’s Onion Router, or Tor, network.";

Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identified five victims from Dallas in one of the agency’s largest operations to uncover an extensive child pornography network that was mostly run from Louisiana.

Other victims from Texas included four from Tyler, three from Lubbock, three from San Angelo, and one from Amarillo. Authorities identified a total of 251 victims from 39 states and five countries. Most of the victims were aged 13 to 15 years old, but a few were younger than 3 years old.

14 men have been arrested in “Operation Round Table” and are accused of either running or distributing material on a child pornography website containing more than 2,000 videos and at least 27,000 members. The website was hosted on the Tor network, which allowed operators to run it anonymously and  to hide the site from the general public. One of the suspects from Louisiana, Jonathan Johnson, has been cited as the primary administrator of the website.

“Our agency is seeing a growing trend where children are being enticed, tricked and coerced online by adults to produce sexually explicit material of themselves,” ICE Deputy Director Daniel Ragsdale said in a press release.

“Operation Round Table” was a joint investigation of ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

 

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