Heroes of Task Force Argos went to extreme lengths to track Shannon McCoole and shut down sickening pedophile site
QUEENSLAND detectives have infiltrated and secretly taken over a global online pedophile network on the ‘dark web’ in a world-first operation.
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QUEENSLAND detectives have infiltrated and secretly taken over a global online pedophile network in a world-first operation.
The Courier-Mail can reveal Task Force Argos investigators were behind the high-profile arrest of carer Shannon Grant McCoole last year.
McCoole had sexually abused at least seven children in his care and his arrest sparked a royal commission into the child-protection system in South Australia.
IN CARE: Families SA worker admits to child sex offences
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But the clean-cut public servant was hiding another secret – Queensland’s Argos had identified him as the head administrator of a 45,000-member pedophile site on the “dark web”.
The site – which cannot be named under court suppression orders – required members to post “hard core pre-teen” child abuse videos or images every 30 days.
Members used Tor computer software to mask their identity, making them almost impossible to trace.
The longer they stayed on the site the more access they were granted, with VIP forums and a private area for people who posted new or rare content.
At the top of the hierarchy was an ultra-exclusive “producer’s area”, reserved for members who abused children on demand and posted footage or photos every two weeks.
To prove it was original material, the producers displayed their handle, or username, on notes during the abuse and staged the scene with a designated item.
Because of a series of other take-downs of pedophile networks on the dark web, the site became the biggest of its kind with more than 360,000 posts and 90,000 topics.
For years, Australian and international police had known a mystery Australian man was running the forum but had been frustratingly unable to identify him.
Argos in particular had been looking into the site since mid-2013, when they had arrested a pedophile during a separate investigation and discovered he was a VIP member.
However the needle-in-a-haystack breakthrough came when Argos victim identification manager Paul Griffiths last year noticed the head administrator habitually used an unusual greeting in online communications.
Scouring the web for other instances of this greeting, Griffiths zeroed in on McCoole, who had been chatting on unrelated, innocuous internet forums. Not only did McCoole use similar language, but the handles he went by were startlingly similar to the one used by the administrator on the abuse site.
As Griffiths looked into McCoole’s background he learned he had access to a wide variety of children through his role at Families SA and alarm bells rang.
With children in danger police immediately coordinated a raid on McCoole’s home in Adelaide. His computer was logged on to the site with his username visible, confirming the arrest of one of the biggest players in child pornography globally.
Taskforce Argos Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said the operation should send a message to pedophiles that they were never beyond reach.
“The dark net areas are perceived as being safe for the sexual exploitation of children. The work performed by Argos detectives through this operation has proven that is not the case,” Insp Rouse said.
After his arrest, two Argos detectives jointly assumed McCoole’s online identity and their squad began a gruelling operation to bring the site and its users down.
One of their first actions was to shut down the “producers” section to protect children from further harm while they hunted their abusers.
Over the next six months, the detectives secretly ran the site from Brisbane’s police HQ while feeding information to international law enforcement colleagues to take down the network’s top echelon.
One of the officers who took over McCoole’s identity said the fraught task stretched police to their limits.
“He doesn’t take days off. He’d been in that community for a very long time, he held a very prominent role in that community, and he was quite well known by a lot of people. It was a lot of work and a lot of stress,” the officer said.
After one key arrest of a co-administrator in the Netherlands, Argos was able to move the computer server hosting the site to Brisbane – giving them full access to every private message and exchange between members.
The operation has now closed and the site has been shut down.
Running a pedophile network is a federal offence carrying a maximum penalty of 25 years in jail and prosecutors are pushing for a record, benchmark sentence for McCoole.
He has pleaded guilty to 18 charges of unlawful sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault and gross indecency and to the production, dissemination and possession of child exploitation material. Sentencing hearings are ongoing.