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Paedophiles 'trade gold' to hide identities
Paedophiles are using offshore gold accounts as a new method to mask their identities when buying child pornography on the web, an internet watchdog said today.
Individuals are buying gold using specialist websites and then using that as "currency" with illegal websites that have similar accounts.
The currency websites are based offshore and out of the jurisdiction of British police, who cannot find out who has made the purchases by demanding access to company records.
Specialist detectives from Operation Ore have previously enjoyed great success in finding those who download abuse images by tracing back credit card details found when the distributing websites were raided.
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Tony Fagelman, general manager of the Internet Watch Foundation, said that there could be hundreds of such currency sites operating, but highlighted one in particular, e-gold.com.
"E-gold started to appear in relation to the payment mechanisms of websites as an alternative to credit cards. It has replaced these over time.
"It uses an anonymous payment system. When you buy with a normal credit card, it can be traced back to you,” he said.
Experts are concerned at this latest development amid new figures which showed that the numbers of internet child pornography websites being reported by the public having risen by almost 80 per cent.
E-gold is based in the
There is no suggestion that e-gold is complicit in criminal activity and the company has been co-operating with authorities in Britain and the US.
The chairman of e-gold is Dr Douglas Jackson, 49, a father-of-two who formerly served as a major in the US Army medical corps at the Brook Army Medical Centre in
Mr Fagelman said that paedophiles started using sites like e-gold around the middle of last year. "Those records are held on a small island which is outside of the jurisdiction of normal legal systems.
"It is not foolproof. But it does make it harder for us to trace them. It is anonymising money."
The scale of the problem facing investigators is highlighted by the latest report from the IWF.
It showed that the number of internet child pornography sites being reported to police went up by 78 per cent last year, with members of the public having sent 23,658 reports of suspicious content to the IWF.
The IWF report said that there was such a sharp rise last year - 78 per cent compared with just 0.003 per cent in the previous 12 months - because of public intolerance of child abuse.
Figures showed that 156 reports concerning
Overall, 40 per cent of child abuse content was connected to the
Mr Fagelman admitted: "It does make it more difficult for the financial trail to be followed and, therefore to capture these people.
"It is a concern to us. But people thought they could get away with it [downloading child pornography] using their credit cards…they did not realise that they were traceable."
