Agents of the National Police have arrested 35 people in 21 Spanish provinces for storing and exchanging child pornography via instant messaging. The investigation, initiated thanks to citizen collaboration, made it possible to detect that one of those arrested had sexually assaulted two young girls. In addition to those arrested, seven people have been investigated for using child pornography storage services, and a total of 112 storage devices have been seized in the 42 searches carried out.
The investigation began as a result of a citizen collaboration email alerting to a possible link containing images of child sexual exploitation. Thanks to the cooperation of companies dedicated to mass storage in the "cloud" and the internal data crossing with the police authorities, it was possible to obtain information regarding who would have allegedly downloaded these images detected in the link.
42 identified in provinces throughout Spain
After a complex analysis work by the investigators, it was possible to arrest 35 people related to storage and exchange in different Spanish provinces - Madrid (5), Alicante (4), Barcelona (4), Castellón (3), Valencia (3), Málaga (2), Salamanca (1), Asturias (1), Cáceres (1), La Rioja (1), Pontevedra (1), Huelva (1), León (1), Cádiz (1), Albacete (1), Vizcaya (1), Navarra (1), Las Palmas (1), Seville (1), Orense (1)- and the investigation of seven others.
Five of the arrests have been made in Madrid, where one of those arrested used up to 14 different storage accounts in the "cloud" and during the search that was carried out in his home, a large number of illicit images were detected on different devices. Another of those arrested, arrested in Albacete, stored more than ten gigabytes of child pornographic content both in a "cloud" storage account and in an instant messaging application.
Two sexual assaults on minors discovered
As a result of the arrest of one of those involved, arrested in Salamanca, it was possible to verify that he would have allegedly participated in the sexual assault of two young girls. The agents' investigations were also able to detect that one of those arrested, in the province of Castellón, used a video game console to store child pornography images.
During the search of the home of a detainee in the province of Vizcaya, it was possible to verify that he had a "cloud" storage of 50 GB of capacity, of which he had 48 occupied with saved images of sexual assaults on children.
In total, 42 entries and searches have been carried out in which 39 hard drives, 46 memory cards, 27 USB sticks, 58 mobile phones, 16 laptops and 6 desktops, 2 video game consoles and relevant documentation for the investigation have been seized.
The collaboration between service providers and investigators from the Central Cybercrime Unit has been essential to combat child pornography trafficking.