Today WIRED is releasing an early, 15,000-word excerpt from Andy Greenberg's new book 'Tracers In The Dark' that tells the story of the crypto-tracing case that led to the takedown of the largest known child sex abuse site ever: 🎨: Mike Mcquade
Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that “participants can be anonymous” in andescribing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism.
He was taken aback by what he saw: An entire network of criminal payments, all intended to be secret, was laid bare before him. The NCA agent showed Levin a Bitcoin address that the agency had determined was part of Welcome to Video’s financial network. Levin suggested they load it in Chainalysis’ crypto-tracing software tool, known as Reactor. He set down his cup of tea, pulled his chair up to the agent’s laptop, and began charting out the site’s collection of addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing the wallets where Welcome to Video had received payments from thousands of customers.
These child sexual abuse consumers seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain. By the standards of the cat-and-mouse game Levin had played for years, Welcome to Video was like a hapless rodent that had never encountered a predator. Yet when Gambaryan and Janczewski had come to Bangkok for the arrest of AlphaBay’s administrator, the French-Canadian Alexandre Cazes, they had been largely excluded from the inner circle of DEA and FBI agents who ran the operation. They hadn’t been invited to the scene of Cazes’ arrest, or even to the office where other agents and prosecutors watched a video livestream of the takedown.
Child sexual exploitation cases had traditionally been the focus of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, certainly not the IRS. In part, that was because child sexual abuse images and videos were most often shared without money changing hands, in what investigators described as a “baseball card trading” system—which put them outside the IRS’s domain. Welcome to Video was different. It had a money trail, and it seemed to be a very clear one.
Yet none of the four had ever worked a child sexual exploitation case. They had no training in handling images and videos of child abuse, whose mere possession, in the hands of normal Americans, represented a felony. They had never even seen these sorts of radioactively disturbing materials, and they had no emotional or psychological preparation for the graphic nature of what they were about to be exposed to.
Past that first greeting page, the site displayed a vast, seemingly endless collection of video titles and thumbnails, arrayed in squares of four stills per video, apparently chosen automatically from the files’ frames. Those small images were a catalog of horrors: scene after scene of children being sexually abused and raped.
The two agents knew that, at some point, they would have to actually watch at least some of the advertised videos. But, mercifully, on their first visits to the site they couldn’t access them; to do so, they’d have to pay bitcoins to an address the site provided to each registered user, where they could purchase “points” that could then be traded for downloads. And since they weren’t undercover agents, they didn’t have the authorization to buy those points—nor were they particularly eager to.
The element of the site that Gambaryan found most unnerving of all, though, was a chat page, where users could post comments and reactions. It was filled with posts in all languages, offering a hint at the international reach of the site’s network. Much of the discussion struck Gambaryan as chillingly banal—the kind of casual commentary one might find on an ordinary YouTube channel.
Gambaryan began reaching out to his contacts in the Bitcoin community, looking for staff at exchanges who might know executives at the two Korean exchanges, Bithumb and Coinone, into which most of Welcome to Video’s money had been cashed out, as well as one US exchange that had received a small fraction of the funds. He found that the mere mention of child exploitation seemed to evaporate the cryptocurrency industry’s usual resistance to government intervention.
Incredibly, the results showed that this computer wasn’t obscured by Tor’s anonymizing network at all; Gambaryan was looking at the actual, unprotected address of a Welcome to Video server. Confirming Levin’s initial hunch, the site was hosted on a residential connection of an internet service provider in South Korea, outside of Seoul.
For a moment, Janczewski felt as though he were looking at Welcome to Video’s administrator face-to-face. But he remembers thinking that something was off: The man in the picture had noticeably dirty hands, with soil under his fingernails. He looked more like a farm worker than the hands-on-keyboard type he’d expected to be running a site on the dark web.
The team began to realize that, as simple as this “slam dunk” case had seemed at first, after the easy identification of the site’s admins, it was actually overwhelming in its complexity. They would need to follow the money not to just one or two web administrators in Korea, but also from that central point to hundreds of potential suspects—both active abusers and their complicit audience of enablers—around the entire globe.
At a particularly memorable point in the night, the Korean agents had been ribbing the US team for their alleged hot-dog-and-hamburger diets. One agent mentioned, a kind of small octopus that some Koreans eat not merely raw but alive and writhing. Tamsi had gamely responded that he’d try it. The strange choice of location—a hotel rather than a government office—was designed to better mask the agent’s identity, in case Welcome to Video could somehow track its users despite Tor’s protection, and also so that, when it came time to prosecute, the DC attorney’s office would be given jurisdiction.
He says watching those videos altered him, though in ways he could only describe in the abstract—ways even he’s not sure he fully understands. “There’s no going back,” Janczewski says, vaguely. “Once you know what you know, you can’t unknow it. And everything that you see in the future comes in through that prism of what you now know.
But as their portrait of this administrator took shape, so too did the profiles of the hundreds of other men who had used the site.* A few immediately stuck out to the investigative team: One suspect, to the dismay of Thomas Tamsi and his Homeland Security colleagues, was an HSI agent in Texas. Another, they saw with a different sort of dread, was the assistant principal of a high school in Georgia.
As they dug deeper, though, they found that the man was a former congressional staffer and held a high-level job at a prestigious environmental organization. Would arresting or searching the home of a target with that sort of profile cause him to make a public outcry, sinking their case? Would their DC-based suspect sound the alarm and tear the lid off their investigation, just as it was getting started?in late October,
Later that day the two IRS-CI agents returned to the scene of the man’s death with a search warrant. They rode the elevator up to the 11th floor with the building’s manager, who was deeply puzzled as to why the IRS was involved, but wordlessly unlocked the door for them. Inside they found an upscale, moderately messy apartment with high ceilings. There were suitcases still not fully unpacked from a trip. The man had ordered a pizza the night before, and part of it remained uneaten on the table.
“We’ve got to focus on the victims here,” Faruqui remembers them telling each other. “That provides clarity.” In spite of his stoicism, this second test case affected Janczewski more than the DC target had. The tidy, well-kept brick two-story house. The parents questioned in separate rooms. The kids the same age as Janczewski’s own, watching. As he stood in the entryway of that house outside of Atlanta, the full toll of the investigation hit him—the fact that every name on their list was a person with human connections and, in many cases, a family.
Was this an actual moderator on the site? Or even the administrator himself—the owner of the site, who they now believed to be Son Jong-woo? Janczewski knew that Torbox and Sigaint, both dark-web services themselves, wouldn’t respond to legal requests for their users’ information. But the BTC-e data included IP addresses for 10 past logins on the exchange by the same user. In nine out of 10, the IP address was obscured with a VPN or Tor. But in one single visit to BTC-e, the user had slipped up: They had left their actual home IP address exposed. “That opened the whole door,” says Janczewski.
Finally, with a creeping sense of dread, Janczewski saw that the Border Patrol agent’s wife had a young daughter—and that he had created a crowdfunding page on GoFundMe to raise money to legally adopt the girl as his stepdaughter. “Janczewski looked back at Welcome to Video and saw that some of the thumbnails of the videos uploaded by the person with this username showed the sexual assault of a young girl about the daughter’s age.
Was this Border Patrol agent an admin on Welcome to Video? A moderator? It hardly mattered. Janczewski now believed he had found the identity of an active child rapist who lived with his victim and had been recording and sharing his crimes with thousands of other users. The Texas man had earned a place at the very top of their target list.
Shortly after the search of the Border Patrol agent’s home, Janczewski arrived at the hotel room where other agents were questioning their suspect. He saw, for the first time, the target of his last week-and-a-half’s obsession. The man was tall and burly, still in his uniform, with thinning hair. He initially refused to talk about any physical abuse he might have committed, Janczewski says, but he eventually confessed to possessing, sharing, and—finally—making child sexual abuse videos.
After an intense 10 days, they’d identified and arrested another alleged child abuser, even rescued his victim. But as he flew back to DC, Janczewski knew that Welcome to Video’s vastly larger network of abuse remained very much intact. And until they took the site itself down, it would continue to serve its videos—including the very ones the Border Patrol agent had uploaded from his Texas home office—to an anonymous throng of consumers just like him.
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