NCMEC states that over the past four years, child porn reports have ballooned by more than 400 percent, and many lawmakers are joining forces with credit card companies in hopes of “choking off” the money flow to those individuals and organizations who profit from the production, distribution and sale of child porn over the Internet.
In 2000, ASACP received only 1,000 reports of suspect child pornography per month and it now receives more than over 6,000 reports; an increase of 600 percent in the last five years, ASACP’s Joan Irvine told XBiz.
"We are encountering staggering proportions of violators or offenders we would have never imagined years ago," Ray Smith of the U.S Postal Inspection Service told the Associated Press.
And much of child porn contact is generating from the United States, NCMEC states.
MasterCard told the AP that it was “appalled” that it is being used to facilitate financial transactions between child pornographers.
Ramping up the attack, agencies from across the globe are brainstorming on ways to stem the tide of child porn rolling across the Internet and other distribution channels.
International law enforcement agency Interpol is compiling a global database of offenders and victims; New Jersey and Florida are enacting requirements for sexual predators to wear GPS devices that keep track of their whereabouts; NCMEC is working with MasterCard to throw a wrench in the process of subscribing to a website that purportedly sells child porn; and Visa has maintained a two-year program to identify child porn sites using its credit cards.
Irvine of ASACP recently attended a Crimes Against Children conference in Dallas, Tex. that addressed the issue of putting a stop to the production and distribution of child porn among pedophiles.
Additionally, because of the sheer volume of child porn cases, investigators first target individuals with access to children, people of trust in the community, NCMEC reports, and website subscribers who had the most transactions.
Among the more significant child porn-related busts that have alerted law enforcement officials to the some of the larger financial networks profiting from child porn was the RegPay case, a Belarus-based company that processed credit card transactions for more than 50 international child porn websites. ASACP was instrumental in helping alert the FBI and NCMEC to RegPay’s involvement with child porn sites.
“More than two years ago, ASACP determined that there was a trend of child porn distributors using paysite programs [unknown by the owners] for payment for their illegal content,” Irvine said. “ASACP worked with the adult entertainment industry and the FBI. This practice has practically been eliminated.”
So far the RegPay case has yielded 35 arrests, and investigators are still reviewing the more than 270,000 subscribers to those sites who used credit cards to obtain child pornography. Law enforcement officials involved in the case have said that more arrests are forthcoming.
"The emphasis is on the money. That's where you focus," Jim Plitt, director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crime Center, said. "More cases are coming."