Germany shuts down major child sexual abuse image platform

Bavarian investigators on Wednesday said they had dismantled a hub used to distribute child sex abuse images that had some 1.8 million users worldwide.

Police described the move to shut down the "Kidflix" streaming service as "one of the biggest blows against child pornography in recent years, if not ever."

What the German police said

The platform was taken offline under the leadership of investigating authorities in the German state of Bavaria.

Guido Limmer, deputy head of the Bavarian criminal police, said police last month carried out searches in the "largest operation ever" organized by Europol.

In a joint German and Dutch raid, authorities shut down the platform's servers and seized a hard drive with around 72,000 videos of child sex abuse.

The Bavarian criminal police said officers raided 96 locations, targeting 103 individual suspects within Germany.

Among them was a 36-year-old man in the eastern German city of Chemnitz who had searched for abuse images on the platform.

The suspect, arrested in January 2024, had also "offered his young son for games." The child was subsequently handed over to child protection services.

German authorities said they had tried to identify child sex abuse victims while the investigation was progressing.

Limmer also said investigators had been able to identify a "serial" abuser in the United States.

How big was the operation?

The EU police agency Europol on Wednesday said 79 people had been detained worldwide, although some 1,400 suspects have been identified internationally. Searches were carried out in 31 countries.

Europol said Kidflix was set up in 2021 and became one of the world's largest pedophile networks, with users downloading and streaming videos showing abuse for a fee. The investigation was the most sweeping operation against child sexual abuse in Europe to date, according to Europol.

Those arrested were not only suspected of watching or downloading child sex abuse images. Some were also under investigation for actively taking part in abuse.

Although the investigation began in 2022, it recently intensified, with authorities seizing thousands of electronic devices and more than 91,000 videos between March 10 and March 23.

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office last year revealed that, in the case of the production and distribution of images of abuse, the number of cases had more than tripled in the past five years. 

In October, German police said they had shut down a "dizzyingly large" child sexual abuse site with hundreds of thousands of users.

Edited by: Sean Sinico