A child pornography website with 400,000 users is gone, thanks to German federal police and Europol. The site, Boystown, had existed on the dark web since June 2019. Four German men, one who had been living in South America for several years, were arrested. Three were administrators, and one was a user who had joined in July 2019 and made more than 3,500 posts, the BBC reports. The site, which German police described in a statement as “one of the world’s largest child pornography darknet platforms,” had a forum and two chat rooms—Lolipub and Boystown. The forum was broken down into categories like “Adolescents” and “Hardcore,” and other disturbing headings.
The Lolipub chat room entrance posted discussion rules including “No disrespect of girls,” and the instruction that users “Cannot be rude, racist, or political.” The German federal police announced Monday that the arrests took place in mid-April, and the men were caught with help from police in Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. The site had been live since June 2019, Vice reports. The Boystown bust was far from the first such dark web site, and it won’t be the last. “Online child offender communities on the dark web exhibit considerable resilience in response to law enforcement actions targeting them,” a Europol reads. In 2015, the FBI took over a similar site and ran it for two weeks in an attempt to identify its users. Another site with hundreds of users was busted in 2019. (More dark web stories.)
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