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A routine visit to the home of a registered sex offender in the UK has led law enforcement to bust an international organised crime group centered in the Philippines that arranged, and profited from, children being sexually abused live on webcam.
An international investigation, “Operation Endeavour,” started in 2012 and has so far resulted in the rescue of 15 children in the Philippines, aged between 6-15, with some of the victims’ own families having arranged for the abuse.
The rescued victims have been placed in the custody of the Philippine Department of Social Welfare and Development.
Child protection agencies have pointed to the emerging use of webcams to stream live abuse, particularly in countries with extreme poverty, increasing availability of high-speed internet, and the access it brings crime rings to wealthy overseas customers willing to pay for the exploitation of children.
Buyers of the video streams paid what law enforcement has so far identified as £37,500 ($61,684).
The crime ring spanned 12 countries.
The British National Crime Agency said in a statement that the investigation has led to 17 arrests in the UK, which have in turn led to 5 convictions and 9 ongoing investigations. One of the arrests required no further action, while two of the individuals are now dead.
The crime ring’s UK customers paid over £5,351 ($8,802) for the video streams, police said.
The investigation started after Northamptonshire Police found a number of indecent videos on the computers of registered sex offender Timothy Ford during a routine visit.
Police say that Ford had been paying for the live abuse of children and planned to move to the Philippines to set up an internet café. He was sentenced in March 2013 to eight and a half years in prison.
Investigations into Ford’s activities and the crime ring’s wider customer network with which he was associated led police to other suspects, including Thomas Owen, who was sentenced in July 2013 to seven years in prison.
When Owen was arrested, police found nearly four million indecent images of children in his possession.
Police also found evidence of Ford and Owen discussing online how they could travel to the Philippines to carry out “contact” abuse of children.
In one such chat log, Ford, who uses a wheelchair, suggested that Owen could act as his caregiver so they could travel to the Philippines together and avoid detection.
After finding the indecent images on Ford’s computers, police called in the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP).
The law enforcement groups together identified a number of “customers” and associates, and a global law enforcement investigation then commenced.
Operation Endeavour has resulted in 29 international arrests so far.
Separate investigations
Meanwhile, three other separate investigations into the live streaming of child sexual abuse are ongoing.
Those investigations have already identified 733 suspects, 139 of whom are in the UK and 594 from other countries.
The investigations have resulted in the conviction of Michael Eller, who has been sentenced to serve 14 years in prison.
Andy Baker, Deputy Director of CEOP, said in the statement that having thousands of miles and a computer between an abuser and his victims doesn’t lessen the guilt of the “customers” who pay for this abuse:
This investigation has identified some extremely dangerous child sexual offenders who believed paying for children to be abused to order was something they could get away with. Being thousands of miles away makes no difference to their guilt. In my mind they are just as responsible for the abuse of these children as the contact abusers overseas.Protecting the victims of abuse is our priority and that means attacking every link in the chain, from dismantling the organised groups who are motivated by profit through to targeting their customers.
Baker went on to say that this type of operation can only be done when law enforcement agencies work together across borders. That includes a host of agencies, including the Philippine National Police and the International Justice Mission (IJM), all of whom worked to share information and intelligence and also to identify and remove exploited children and to safeguard them from further harm.
The idea that technology is aiding in the abuse of children is disheartening. Fortunately, technology is also working on their behalf.
That was evidenced in November with the news about “Sweetie”, a 10-year-old Filipina CGI girl who had at that point been used to identify 1,000 alleged paedophiles.
Using Hollywood-style animation techniques, researchers created a lifelike character and seeded 19 public online chat forums with her very convincing live-action image.
Over 20,000 alleged predators asked her to perform paid sex acts over the course of 10 weeks, of whom 1,000 were identified, using no hacking methods whatsoever.
Kudos to the investigators who rescued 15 children in Operation Endeavour and to ongoing efforts to use technology to fight back against the very sex tourism that technology is, unfortunately, abetting.
This type of, I hesitate to call them person, is simply despicable.
How they can accept let alone participate and encourage pedophilia is unfathomable.
I do understand and have heard ad nausea the plethora of excuses, from “I didn’t know the age, etc, etc to they themselves being abused, which is even more horrific as they should know what it feels like.
Is there no way individuals can get involved in exposing these scumbags?
Fourteen years in prison is far too lenient in my opinion. They cause the death of individuals just as much as if they killed the children. A new individual is born a damaged version of what the abused child should have been, forever altering and in some cases creating new monsters that perpetuate this plague. The lucky ones (if you can call it that) spend years in therapy trying to regain what they lost.
my husband used to work in a state penitentiary and has stated that if the nature of the crime became known to the general prison population the abuser will be marked and will suffer. crimes against children are considered the worst in prisons, they will not leave unscathed if they’re alive at the end of their time…
Unfortunately, technology is abetting the horror far more than it is helping to end it. And seven years seems like a slap on the wrist to me. Watching the abuse should also be the same as causing it because, in effect, it has caused it.
This is just too disgusting to contemplate, people like this should be locked up for life. They make these kids suffer so severely that their freedoms are denied in more ways than one. The more we catch the better for everyone, especially for those kids….
I’m based in Northamptonshire, fairly odd for this kind of thing to happen around this area.
Geographical location has nothing to do with the probability of abuse occurring. It’s the people who commit the offences that dictate the probability.
Northamptonshire police have uncovered your area as being the seat of some pretty sick activity along the lines of what this story is about.
Herein lies the problem. As law enforcement we see this in many ways, but as a society, it is difficult to correct a problem where the person was probably indoctrinated by their parents to continue down the same path. I don’t have a ‘fix’ for it, but when you immediately throw someone in jail for many years, you are not stopping the problem, it needs some kind of social psychiatry to fix these types of people. If you don’t believe this, then we should put them away for life, as prison doesn’t stop this type of problem. They need to be stopped before they reproduce and pass the activity to their children. I wish I had a solution, and yes they are perverted, but the way we do it now is not working. We need to remove this type of behavior from society and the prison route is not working. Unfortunately it is hurting children and their lives, where they continue doing this to their children.
Jack
No amount of correctional work will work out without them realising that what they do is wrong, and my understanding is that most proper pedophiles think that there is nothing wrong with their actions, I may have that wrong and quite happy to stand corrected. In a similar way the first step to healing in an alcoholic is admission, unfortunately it is unlikely to happen in a jail, yet they need to be kept away from children. Maybe a secure setting where there is no access to internet and no access to any children, and instruction given to bring to a realisation how awful the whole thing is, just thinking aloud.
“I’m based in Northamptonshire, fairly odd for this kind of thing to happen around this area.”
I’d be astonished if that were so, Ryan – it happens everywhere. But mos abusers are good at keeping their activities hidden.