FBI agents looking for abusers search Bit Torrent to spot people sharing exploitive images.
The raid began just before dawn, as seven vanloads of police, investigators, lawyers and social workers rolled out of Manila, past rice paddies and water buffalo, and into a town that was once a large US military base, now a major red light district.
The tip that led authorities to Deakin came, as they often do, when an online international money transfer service notified an American internet provider about a suspicious account.
Western Union, Pay Pal and others have reported concerns in the past.
Deakin’s arrest on April 20 reveals one of the darkest corners of the internet, where pedophiles in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia pay facilitators on the other side of the world to sexually abuse children, even babies, directing their moves through online livestreaming services.
The relatively new crime of webcam sex tourism is spreading rapidly, with new digital technologies sparking what the United Nations calls an “alarming growth of new forms of child sexual exploitation online.” The FBI says it’s epidemic, and that at any given moment, 750,000 child predators are online.