06| The Glitch - The Children in the Pictures

(upbeat music) A listener, production. - Before we start a warning, what you're about to hear involves sexual abuse against children. Listen to discretion is advised. Some details have been changed to protect the identities of victim survivors. Police have also obscured some methodologies used to catch child abuse perpetrators so as to not compromise ongoing investigations. (upbeat music) It's June, 2014. Argos are now more than six months into the operation with no end in sight. Top dog's ski is in prison. Tech mastermind I/O is in custody. And Argos has control of the love zone, but they can't shut it down yet. There's a super predator still standing. He's drawing everyone's attention, investigators and perpetrators alike for all the wrong reasons. He goes by the handle. (beep) For legal reasons, we're calling him K. - Hit the jackpot. A three-year-old girl was loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care. Impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class kids. - That's a typical post from K. There's a lot that disturbs victim I de-lead Paul Griffiths about K. He's prolific. From the materially posts online, it's clear he has access to many victims. - He's kind of like someone who's been given a job in a chocolate factory and he just can't stop eating chocolate. Basically it was just there for him. But worst of all, he puts out a guide on how to abuse children in developing countries. Because from the materially sharing, that's where he appears to be located. - That's the beauty of poverty and corruption. If some bastard little kid is being sexually exploited, nobody gives a damn because it'd probably be more a nuisance having the child roaming free, causing problems than having them in confinement for someone else's pleasure. (dramatic music) - I'm a Kim Dev. This is the children in the pictures. Episode six, The Glitch. Argos investigators have to tread very carefully. With the arrest of the Love Zone's resident tech head, I.O. in the Netherlands, Argos is now migrating the site to Australia. It means the world's biggest online child abuse network will be physically run out of the police headquarters in Brisbane. This is a really delicate moment. If the Love Zone members notice something's changed, there's every chance they'll simply vanish into the dark. Members like Kay. The stakes couldn't be higher. Kay's victims are out there while he roams free, destroying more lives. One mistake and the entire investigation could be jeopardised, and those children never found. Leibor Yock is running the operation from the Brisbane office. Argos needs 30 minutes to make the switch, and the network goes offline. (dramatic music) There was like an half an hour of content missing. It doesn't seem like much. 30 minutes of content disappearing on a network made up of millions of posts. But unfortunately, the person who notices this tiny glitch in the Love Zone is one of its most obsessive members, Kraft Ebbing. He's like the professor of the site, cataloging and analysing all the different material being traded. And now, a little part of his collection has disappeared. I don't know what's happening, but I think I have to warn you. As Argos undercover agents monitor the topic threads, Kraft sounds the alarm with ski, aka Leibor, at Argos headquarters. I hate to be paranoid, but there is something in this here. Kraft Ebbing actually picked up on it. He said, "This was the time it sort of took to bring it down and all up, and then suddenly there is this stuff missing." Like, I don't know how he worked it out, so he just saw all this is dodgy. Kraft Ebbing is totally tech savvy with an eye for detail. The one advantage Argos can use to hold Kraft Ebbing a bay is that inside the Love Zone, he's incredibly unpopular. He's argumentative, whining, and more often than not, he's bickering with ski. He had a very high opinion of himself, and he considered himself very knowledgeable about the theme they were operating in, so child exploitation. So he sort of was striking the pose of like a professor of child exploitation, like the professor of the board. If it wasn't his way, it was no one's way. His way was always right. That's why I think he had conflict with his key or clashed with him because they were just in a way similar, different but similar. So far Kraft is only raising his concerns with ski, while Argos are behind the keyboard. But if he keeps sniffing around, he'll be a huge threat to the operation. You can think of him as being a photo-negative copy of Paul Griffiths. His methodical and precise. But while Paul is a world leader in locating victims, Kraft excels in avoiding law enforcement agencies, or LEA. He made a massive post on the site called LEA 101, where he describes in pretty graphic detail how the police find victims from child abuse images, and then illustrates it with a number of examples as to how that had happened. And he's right in quite a lot of the cases to be honest. I think the funny thing about Kraft was that he actually wrote about a case and explained how the police had found the victim before the police had actually found the victim. And he gave us the clue that I identified who she was. We should go and thank him one day for that. What would you give the guard out of five stars? Well, if it's any consolation to him, I use it in all of my trainings. So I presented it just this week actually in the victim ID training as an example of the lengths to which they go to educate themselves and to keep themselves safe online. To be sure the investigation is uncompromised, they need to take Kraft air being out. But they're not sure where to look, so the investigation digs deep into his history. And it turns out that in the past he's made a mistake. Argos work with their international collaborators and they find it. Very deep within the data from a previous police investigation is Kraft Ebbing's IP address, the unique identifier of every computer on the internet. Perpetrate is usually go to great lengths to keep their IP address hidden. But even the super cautious guys can screw up, and this mistake leads me to Spain. I catch a flight to Madrid and follow Kraft Ebbing's trail. What I learn is unexpected. This is how a seemingly ordinary guy falls down the rabbit hole. I'm in Madrid at the headquarters of Spain's national police, where the specialist unit investigating online child abuse networks is based. I'm speaking to the man who knows what happened next to Kraft Ebbing. Pedro Romero is a really approachable guy. But his English and my Spanish need a little bit of help. What's the current state of play in Spain at the moment in child abuse investigations? A colleague of Pedro's is helping out. You'll hear him translating for Pedro in English. If you want I can give you a general knowledge to go to how we work here in the national police. Pedro is a background in computers, so encrypted tall browsers aren't a new thing for him. But his investigation into the love zone was when he really came to understand the sorted hierarchies of child abuse dark web forums and how Kraft Ebbing rose through their ranks. Pedro tells me about how Kraft Ebbing was sucked into the love zone after striking up an online relationship with a female model from Eastern Europe. The young woman told him that she and her friends were abused as children while on a modeling shoot. It's pretty ironic, right? It seems like he started out with fairly decent intentions, wanting to be some kind of hero for his online girlfriend, trying to track down her alleged abuser. In some ways, he presents as a massive geek straight from central casting. But in other ways, he's harder to pin down. He's highly intelligent and educated with a command of languages. A real obsessive type. Kraft makes it his mission to find the images of his girlfriend like some sort of vigilante. And then, in the clean air, he finds a link to the love zone. This is the story Kraft Ebbing tells the Spanish police. And throughout their investigations, Pedro says that they haven't found any evidence to contradict Kraft's version of events. He is Pedro's translator. And that's the way he became aware of that forum and he asked to get registered in it. They asked for a typography and he provided his very small collection and then he got into it. And he realized that on the tour network, information was power. And he could get up in the ladder by controlling everything he got and everything he was given away. But little by little, he's getting sucked into the love zone culture. And before you know it, his attempts to get promoted to the higher levels of the network become an objective in itself. It then becomes obsessive about the abuse images, endlessly categorizing them like some sort of crazy librarian. Once again, this is a preteen forum. JL8 does not count because this is not a JL8 forum. It is mandatory to establish a filter on all the assholes, morons, selfish, one day newbies who are ruining TLZ with their lack of common sense and respect to the rules and already established community. This is a child-loved board. The way Pedro sees it, Kraft's captivated by the power games being played inside the network. And he just loses all sense of reality. He's forgotten about the victims, supposedly the reason he got into this mess in the first place. To him, it's some kind of horrific video game and he's just determined to level up. It's like the psychologist Dr. Michael Burke told me in Washington. These networks are in many ways like any other social network. There's subcultures that establish their own rules and decide what is morally acceptable, at least to them. It's individuals getting together to minimize and rationalize and normalize behavior that our conscience should naturally be going into the red zone and pushing us back away from the support behavior. But because we're in a group of like-minded people that becomes more tolerable becomes more okay. But now, Argos and their international collaborators have tipped off the Spanish police with Kraft Emmings IP address. And soon enough, this leads Pedro to an apartment in the Spanish city of Caceres. Problem is, two men live in the house, a father and his adult son. And at first they can't be sure which one is Kraft Emmings. The home is put under surveillance. And Pedro's team waits patiently for the opportunity to pounce. But the son never appears, not once. Only the father ventures out for errands and supplies, which pretty much confirms to them. It was the son. Kraft Emmings is incurably online. It's got to be him. It was in our common investigation. They had been tracking the house and they knew the routines of the father. They, one of the times, they knew that he was going out for sure to buy a bread or a day, so they stuck him. They grabbed his keys. The Spanish police need the father's keys so they can enter the house quietly and stop his son Kraft Emmings in his tracks. Breaking down the door might be a good scene for Hollywood, but it could tip off Kraft and give him a chance to lock his computer before they can get to it. It would mean risking the chance to collect evidence that could save more children in the pictures. So enter with the keys and they just open the door. Okay, police. Step aside from the computer and he was like, okay, okay. I mean, he was very surprised, but he didn't try anything and use it. It's an understated operation with big outcomes. Kraft Emmings' restaurant only takes out a major threat to Argos' undercover operation, but more importantly, it helps identify new victims. At least 15 children are put on global police watch lists after the bath and Pedro and his crew send leads to countries in Europe and beyond. He identified a new series that he created that contained metadata with geolocation. So he gave that to the different countries. Okay, this guy is making this in your country and he's living here and the victim is here. How do you feel being a part of this global investigation? As a father who has kids are very proud and with the craving for more. As a father of two girls, I get it. After years of watching Argos, I know how the work gets under your skin. It's hard to turn away from the children in the pictures. But all I want to do is clear my mind from what I've seen. I want a good night's sleep. But I just can't seem to get it. As Argos takes down the top dogs of the love zone one by one, there's a dangerous predator still standing. More online than I.O. More annoying than Kraft Emmings. And even more scheming than ski. It's okay. And the police know that he is targeting impoverished children. These are direct quotes of his on the love zone. And a warning, they're pretty hard to hear. If a precious gift is wrapped, then it should eventually be unwrapped. Seriously, stripping on video or even physically undressing kids is just the biggest excitement for me. Like opening a gift at Christmas every time. Paul Griffiths has read hundreds of K's posts. I ask him to describe K in three words. God obnoxious, evil, manipulator. K likes to take requests from other members on the love zone. And he awards himself quote, pedo points. He turned it into a game horse by giving himself points by, you know, awarding himself merits for what he was doing. Even after years of investigating child sexual abuse online, there's something particularly disturbing about K. The kids that K targets look Indian. I'm Indian. It really resonates with me. And I know in some communities it would be too shameful for parents to admit their child had been abused. Meaning he could get away with it again and again and again. When we were looking at who he might be and where he might be, if he was in India, then we knew that we were just completely up against it because there was no way that he was ever going to be shocked by the families or by the community or a very unlikely that he would be. Because, as you say, it's just the shame involved and the potential fallout from that was just too much for them to bear. The other thing that bugged me was his blasé, almost naive comments on the abuse he was committing. Here's another one of his posts. I'm not sure why, but these kids just seem to do everything I dream of. I'm nothing special. Maybe it's the ice cream or maybe they just can't help themselves. I mean, using ice cream to lure children, it's not like this guy's a criminal mastermind, but what he's shocking is to witness what a bit of power and cute us can do to encourage someone down this dark path. The thing is, I'm not really much of a gifted or talented person, not really a pro at anything except being a pedophile. By no means am I claiming to be a king or a top dog or an elite in this community, but the experiences I've had and the regularity of them put me way up in what people here aspire to. At Argos, all eyes are on K. Interpol Victim ID specialist Adele Dezeer is watching K's material being uploaded to the exor database in real time. This database is where international police forces share material they've uncovered on the dark web. She's never seen anything like this before. Yeah, it was like shocking, I think. For me, maybe it was the first, I would say, in the Amount of Victims, devolureability, their young age. Absolutely horrific, yeah. He was indiscriminate as well as boys and girls. It was both, yeah. So whenever we noticed that an offender has access to multiple children, especially like the staggering numbers we were seeing in ****, for example, this case always gets prioritized. It has to become, yeah, the top of the pile because as long as we don't arrest him, he's going to make new victims that's for sure. K. has a well-liked plan. When he's not abusing children, he's a freelance photographer. But now he wants to build some kind of sick business empire. It involves setting up a site with his own branding where he could potentially sell his quite unquote content. He's looking for crowd funding so he pitches his idea to the love zone members. He calls it peto funding. And the material being posted by K is like nothing the Argos investigators have ever encountered before. So many victims, it's totally next level. Even though K was boastful in his post to members, he was extremely careful not to reveal anything in his images that might identify him. But Paul Griffiths had a victim idea at Argos saw an opportunity. The sheer volume of K's contributions had to contain some clues. The amount he wrote meant that it was hard for him to completely hide and completely anonymise himself. There were certain things about the way he wrote that meant that he had to be a native English speaker, but there certainly wasn't anything close to enough to identify him, especially as initially we thought we were looking in India. It's the second most populated country in the world and one of the hardest to penetrate from this type of crime. Most of K's victims can be identified as being of Indian origin. But just like my family, Indian communities can be found everywhere in the Asia Pacific. Over time, his post become more arrogant and more revealing about who he is. He goes into great detail about how he grooms kids, basically how he selects them and ingratiates himself into a poor community. It turns out he's masquerading as a nice Christian youth worker. PETA files are willing to do a lot more for children in dire need of someone to take care of them. In exchange for sex of course, then do a gooders who do nothing more than report the incident and let the authorities put the kid in a home or back on the streets. This really sets me back on my heels. K's seriously arguing that the abuses are actually helping these kids. In encrypted chats on the network, K's leaves clues about visiting a number of different countries over several years. But where to start looking? They know he's a native English speaker and that he's gained the trust of the communities where he's abusing children with impunity. You realise that he does have access to a number of children from the material that was being produced. It was very likely that he was a travelling child sex offender. But how many millions of people are also regularly travelling across Asia? It's a daunting needle in a haystack situation. Paul has an idea. And we then began concentrating on him as one of a number of targets just to see if there were going to be mistakes in what he'd produced or if there were going to be clues that would lead us to who he was. It's the same situation Argos was facing in finding ski all those months ago. Paul reasons K would have to have a presence on social media and his normal life. Maybe if Argos trolls through profiles on the open internet, there'll be a similar slip up as the one that bought ski under. Paul's team takes K's images from the love zone and tries to match them with similar images posted on what they call the "clean hit". That's the regular internet for the rest of us. So, clear net sites in particular where we might be able to find material posted by people that would be similar in nature and similar in production to the material that he produced. Before long, Paul's hunch pays off. But interestingly enough, these sites didn't have any links to India. I remember hitting one day on some images that were from a photographic studio that was operating in Malaysia. And when we did some analysis across the images, we realised that there was some crossover between them and they were definitely produced as far as we could see from the same camera as same person. By unlocking some of the metadata buried within the images, the identity of the guy behind the camera comes into focus. It then became obvious that this guy was a UK national living in Malaysia and we were pretty certain that he was the guy who produced all of this material. It appears K is spent years in Malaysia and elsewhere in South East Asia praying on children. He's been using his nice Christian youth worker charade to exploit one Indian religious community in particular. Paul is now in a position to pass on his leads to some of his former colleagues in the British police. We helped them find an address. The address is in Malaysia, where K is often based. The Brits turn to Malaysian law enforcement to track him down. And as I understand it, I think they were having a hard time convincing the Malaysians that there was enough to act on. The investigation is derailing right before their eyes. The Malaysian authorities simply don't have the laws that properly define child sexual abuse. Nor do they really have the experience to gather evidence about crimes on the dark web. The Argos team are facing the prospect that all their hard work trying to nab this guy might have come to know. But then as sometimes happens in this game they get a little lucky. Next time on the children in the pictures, it just happened. Good fortune I suppose more than anything else that we found out that he was returning to England. K has finally slipped up. He did his great big favor by posting on social media that he was going back to England for Christmas and told us what date he was going back and which airline he was going back on. K is about to get a Christmas surprise. It's the got your moment that might end the love zone for good. But in the meantime, Argos agents are struggling. It was pretty much 24/7. Do you have any pressure on you at home? Oh yeah. So after his operation I pretty much nearly lost it. This podcast is dedicated to all victims and survivors of sexual crimes against children and those that stand against the sexual exploitation of children. If you know a child in immediate danger please contact police. Call triple zero. For non-urgent police assistance contact 131 triple four. If you need immediate support contact the kids' helpline on 1-800-55-1800 or lifeline on 13-11-14. For more information and help go to childreninthepitches.org or head over to the A site the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation a triple ce.gov.au This podcast is a listener production made by the factual original podcasting. Head of factual and drama for listener original podcasts is Jennifer Goggin. Co-produced in collaboration with DNX Media. Produced and reported by me, Akim Dev and Simon Nashd. Sound design, composition and audio production by Darcy Thompson. Production assistance and theme composition by Matthew Dwyer. Additional audio production by Michael Lepho. A series producer is Rommie Sher. Fact check by Bonnie Levelle. Factual original podcast executive producers are Belinda Lopez and Emma Lancaster. Queensland Police were consulted for this production. Thanks to Argos and the other global child protection agencies who shared their stories with us. Special thanks to Dr. Assa Kasparm and Dr. Jacqueline Goldstein for their guidance and expertise. And if you're concerned about your own thoughts and feelings or behaviours towards children, there is support. Stop it now is an anonymous Australian helpline that aims to support adults who have sexual thoughts about children to prevent offending. The helpline is also for parents, professionals, family and community members who come across child sexual abuse. If you're worried about an adult or young person's sexual behaviour offline or online, you can call the anonymous helpline on 1-800-0-1-1-800 or use a live chat or secure messaging service. To find out more, head to stopitnow.org.au.