As part of its crackdown on child pornography, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) — based on its initial probe — has found involvement of more than 50 groups, having more than 5,000 offenders sharing child sexual abuse material on social media and other platforms, which involves foreign nationals and mobile numbers of around 100 nationalities, CNN-News18 has learnt.
Sources in the CBI said that the investigative agency plans to take up the matter with social media websites and hosting platforms under the relevant legal provisions to examine their role and liability.
Also Read: Online Child Sexual Abuse: 3 Districts in Odisha Under CBI Scanner, Raids On in 13 Others States and UTs
As part of the nationwide crackdown, the probe agency had on Tuesday carried out coordinated raids at 77 locations in 14 states and detained 10 accused for allegedly posting and circulating the illicit child pornography content on the Internet. The raids were carried out in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh.
It registered 23 cases against 83 people involved in the sexual abuse of children. They are accused of posting and circulating abuse material on the webspace.
Sources in the CBI told CNN-News18 that the 50 groups with more than 5,000 offenders sharing child sexual abuse material include those in Pakistan (36), Canada (35), USA (35), Bangladesh (31), Sri Lanka (30), Nigeria (28), Azerbaijan (27), Yemen (24) and Malaysia (22).
Sources further said that the CBI plans to coordinate with various foreign law enforcement agencies for taking further action related to foreign nationals and also about the origin of the CSEM (child sexual exploitation material). The CBI is also coordinating with sister agencies through formal and informal channels, sources added.
Money trail being followed
During the initial investigation, it was observed that some individuals were involved in trading of CSEM for monetary benefits. CBI sources said that during searches of electronic gadgets/mobiles/laptops etc. at many locations, it was revealed that persons were disseminating CSEM through sharing links, videos, pictures, texts, posts and hosting of such content on social media groups/platforms and third-party storage/hosting platforms. The accused were earning regular income via their bank accounts linked to such online platforms, sources told CNN-News18.
Money trail is now being followed to work out the backward and forward linkages of the offenders, sources added.
One disturbing trend noticed by the CBI during this operation is that several persons have done trading/selling of the CSEM and were sharing links on various groups/platforms.
Such persons have their wallets/bank accounts linked to such platforms and are being paid on the basis of the views collected by the material shared by them, thereby encouraging them to share more and more on such groups leading to large scale dissemination.
The probe agency also plans to coordinate with International Child Sexual Exploitation Database to compare the child sexual abuse images in order to trace the origin of the same.
Meanwhile, an Interpol report has stated that an estimated 2.4 million instances of online child sexual abuse were reported from India from 2017 to 2020 and 80 per cent of these children were girls under the age of 14 years.
It also said that the content and consumers of child pornography are growing at a sharp rate. One of the findings shows that search engines get over 1,16,000 queries related to child pornography every day.
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