Police take down 'Kidflix' child abuse platform, Europol says

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Police shut down one of the largest paedophile networks in the world last month in an operation spanning 35 countries, the EU's law enforcement agency Europol said on Wednesday.

Europol said 79 suspects had been arrested for sharing and distributing child sexual abuse material on a platform known as Kidflix. Some of those arrested are suspected of having abused children themselves, it said.

German and Dutch authorities seized the central server of the platform, which contained 72,000 videos at the time.

Europol said a total of around 91,000 unique videos had been uploaded and shared on the hugely profitable platform, which was created in 2021 and attracted 1.8 million users worldwide in the past three years.

"Unlike other known platforms of this kind, Kidflix not only enabled users to download child sexual abuse material but also to stream video files. Users made payments using cryptocurrencies, which were subsequently converted into tokens," Europol said.

Users could earn tokens by uploading material, verifying titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos, it added.

Europol said the operation had been the largest ever handled by its experts in fighting child sexual exploitation and one of the biggest cases the agency had supported in recent years.

It said a total of almost 1,400 suspects had been identified, while 39 children were protected through the operation.

(Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Gareth Jones)