National Police Agents they have arrested 18 people in an operation carried out in 13 provinces for possessing and distributing child sexual exploitation both from computers and from mobile devices, for which they used private connections to make it difficult to locate their users.
The arrests have been made in the provinces of A Coruña, Alicante, Barcelona, Burgos, Cádiz, Castellón, Ciudad Real, Girona, Guipúzcoa, Lanzarote, Madrid, Tarragona and Tenerife for alleged distribution and possession of material from child sexual exploitation via the Internet, as reported by the National Police.
During the operation, initiated by the collaboration with USAthe agents have intervened 21 mobile phones, two tablets, six computers, eight hard drives, six memory cards, 17 USB sticks and a camera
Notice from the US embassy
The investigation began in January 2020 thanks to the international cooperation in the fight against the sexual exploitation of minors through the Internet. In this case, it was the Embassy of the USA which informed the agents of the detection of various Internet connections in Spain from which, presumably, content with child pornography material was being distributed.
Specifically, the information received had its origin in the complaints made by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). At least 20 individuals, located in our country, would have used their virtual accounts to store and share files with child sexual exploitation content with other pedophiles.
As usual in the commission of this type of crime, its authors used private connections (VPN) to anonymize the true IP addresses of their terminals. In this way, they prevent or hinder the location of their users.
Those arrested used both their computers (laptops and desktops) and their mobile terminals, often synchronized with each other, which is why the investigators had to target the search on any computer device.
The National Police has reminded citizens of the importance of not sharing or saving this type of sexual images and videos featuring minors, as they would be committing a crime. For this, there is the possibility of denouncing the content by email [email protected]
