p2pnet - rss feed: UK’s biggest Net paedophile op
p2pnet.net News:- Seven thousand people were investigated leading to more than 1,200 convictions in Britain’s largest ever hunt for internet paedophiles.
The investigation - Operation Ore - came about following the 2001 conviction of a Texas man, Thomas Reedy, on charges including Sexual Exploitation of Minors and Distribution of Child Pornography.
Reedy, now 40, was sentenced to life and his wife, Janice, charged with him and now 35, was sentenced to 14 years in jail.
The Reedys ran Landslide Inc, a credit card verification service that was also a gateway to websites run by foreign webmasters R.W. Kusuma and Hanny Ingganata of Indonesia and Boris Greenberg of Russia, says the US Attorney, Northern District of Texas here. The sites featured pictures and movies of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct
Internet customers had to give a credit card number as well as pay $29.95 per month to gain access to the pornographic productions on the web sites.
Reedy was the company president and his wife did the book-keeping and made the payments to Kusuma, Ingganata and Greenberg, said the Texas DA page. An investigator testified that Thomas Reedy said Landslide provided access to about 5700 websites.
In 102 Operation Ore cases, there was evidence British children had been abused so images could be traded online, says the BBC here.
The UK’s National Crime Squad says more than 1,300 cases are still being investigated and prioritised its investigations into categories, states the BBC report, going on:
“The first - with around 1,200 names - included convicted paedophiles and those with access to children. The second covered those in positions of authority such as police and magistrates and the third was for suspects not involved with children.
“Businessmen, civil servants, lawyers and people in the media were named. They included Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who insisted he was merely researching the subject. He was arrested in January 2003, cautioned and had his name put on the sex offenders’ register after he admitted accessing child porn.
“Those since convicted have included doctors, teachers and police.”
