The police investigation, called "Operation Ore," was started in May 2002 when police received a list with the names of 7,000 people whose credit cards had reportedly been used to buy child pornography from a U.S. company called Landslide Inc. The BBC reports that of this week, 2,300 people on the list have been found guilty of offenses, but another 2,000 people were under investigation for months before charges were dropped.
Landslide was the central credit card handler for hundreds of other porn sites, some of them involving adults, and some containing images of children. Many of the sites were run by criminals in Russia and Indonesia, who would use details from the credit cards to subscribe to their own websites.
No one had any idea of the scale of the fraud until Jim Bates, a computer forensics expert, got access to all the Landslide records in 2006. Within an hour, he started to find evidence of systematic credit card fraud.
"It was that obvious...it just jumped out at you," Bates said.
"Operation Ore, I think, will go down as one of the worst police scandals in history," Professor Ross Anderson, an expert in security engineering at Cambridge University, said. "The police just didn't look for or understand the evidence of wholesale card fraud and as a result hundreds of people, possibly in the low thousands, have had the six o'clock knock from the police ... when they were just the innocent victims of credit card fraud."
Credit card scams involving child porn take a bait-and-switch approach in the United States, according to Rick Louis, Communications & Government Affairs Manager for ASACP.
"The ASACP hotline has uncovered credit card theft scams disguised as child pornography paysites," Louis told XBIZ. "The operators of these sites solicit credit card numbers from pedophiles, using one crime to hide another crime. Obviously, the people who try to subscribe to these sites aren’t about to go call the cops or complain to the Better Business Bureau. There is at least one ring that operates several child porn paysites as fronts for stealing credit cards."
"However, it’s important to differentiate between those sites, which steal from people who are actively seeking child pornography online, and credit card theft like the kind alleged in the Operation Ore case," he said.