Investigation in child porn distribution ends in arrest of 5 people involved with web hosting company in Toronto

The details in this story are disturbing.

A seven-year long investigation has revealed what police are calling a big box store of child pornography distribution. The OPP say this is an unprecedented case of international child porn sharing, stemming from a web hosting company in Toronto.

Five Toronto area men have been arrested. The OPP say arrests like these have never been made before, because instead of solely going after customers of child porn and administrators of these websites, police have arrested 5 people involved with the web hosting company they say was providing the infrastructure for this website to operate.

Police say the child porn website was so large that it occupied 32 servers that were seized from Yesup media in Toronto back in 2012. Police say Yesup media were hosting the website for an administrator in Vietnam. The OPP say thousands of children, from across the world are victims in this massive crackdown.

In the 6 months that the website was operating in 2012, police say it was very lucrative. The explicit content on the page was downloaded over 19 million times.

The men associated with Yesup Media have been charged with 11 offences, including making child porn available and not reporting the illegal content to police. The administrator of the website, who police believe has never visited Canada, is still at large in Vietnam.

The OPP say this is the first time a web host has been charged in a child porn case. Police say the investigation took 7 years because of it’s complexity and size. Back in 2012 the OPP didn’t even have the storage space to save the enormous number of files that were on these servers, adding that it was a particularly tough investigation as officers had to sift through 400 thousand explicit pictures and videos of innocent children being exploited.