Police task force finds new child ‘sextortion’ victims

A police review of millions of computer files seized during a national child-sex abuse operation has led to the discovery of 10 new Australian victims.

Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation operations manager Jon Rouse in his office. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

A federal and state police review of millions of computer files seized during a national child-sex abuse operation has led to the discovery of 10 new Australian victims.

Victim identification experts from the Australian Federal Police, South Australia Police and the Queensland Police Service formed a taskforce to delve into files seized in Operation Molto, an investigation that led to the arrest in 2020 of 44 men on 350 charges.

The victim ID taskforce worked out of the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation headquarters in Brisbane over four days late last year and looked at 3.75 million files.

Ten children were identified who had previously been overlooked, all victims of online “sextortion” who had produced the content themselves, a trend of increasing concern for investigators.

Police arrested 44 men across the country in 2020 over child exploitation in an operation called Strike Force Molto.

ACCCE operations manager Jon Rouse said frontline police were often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of images collected in raids for child exploitation ­material. “Our investigators across the country did their jobs, but once you peel back the layers of a digital seizure and dig in, you actually find significantly more,” Detective Inspector Rouse said.

Investigators from the taskforce sent referrals relating to another 20 international victims to 12 countries, including the US and Russia. More than 5000 new media files were added to Interpol’s International Child Sexual Exploitation database.

Operation Molto was launched after intelligence was ­received that thousands of offenders were using a cloud storage platform to share child abuse ­material online. It resulted in ­arrests in every state and the ACT.

An arrest during Molto, which targeted the sharing extreme child abuse material online.

The ACCCE has funding through the National Office for Child Safety to raise victim identification capabilities across the country.

Inspector Rouse said expert training would be offered this year to assist frontline police in searching for new victims of abuse, who could sometimes be missed in the vast numbers of images seized. The victim ID taskforce confirmed a disturbing pattern of children producing their own abuse images, sometimes as a ­result of extortion after being targeted on social media and video-sharing platforms, he said.

“We are continuing to see 60 to 70 per cent of new material is self-produced – children producing content,” Inspector Rouse said.

“Children may think they’re talking to Justin Bieber, or that they are talking to some 14 or 15-year-old guy or girl, who ends up being a child-sex offender.”

Once a child sent an abuse image, they were threatened with public exposure unless they sent more.

“Globally, there is huge evidence of cases where child-sex ­offenders have done this to children, and they are trapped and don’t know what to do,” Inspector Rouse said. “I don’t think people have any understanding of how bad this is. A lot of the content has been produced under the noses of parents. It’s happening in their house and they don’t even know it’s going on.”

Queensland police victim identification specialist Scott ­Anderson, part of the team that monitors online abuse forums for the state’s Task Force Argos, said offenders had tricked children into performing sexual acts on camera within 10 minutes of contacting them online.

Detective Brevet Sergeant ­Stephen Hegarty from South Australia Police said there was an ­increase in the sharing of explicit content by children accessing the internet at a young age, often unsupervised and spending long hours using electronic devices in isolation.