Web host charged in bust of 'horrific' child porn site
 

Five men involved with a Toronto-area web hosting company have been arrested on allegations that they knowingly allowed their servers to be used by a child porn website with tens of thousands of users.

Ontario Provincial Police announced the arrests Thursday, saying the men were involved in operating YesUp Media. They allege that one of YesUp’s clients was a man who wanted to use its servers to host a website for the uploading and downloading of pornographic images of children.

Tips regarding the website’s existence started coming to police attention in 2012, Det.-Insp. Dave MacDonald told a press conferenceon Thursday.

“People from around the world were seeing, basically, advertising for this website and were discovering really intense child porn,” he said.

“These are not simple images of children in bathing suits. These are really, really horrific.”

McDonald said police initially searched YesUp’s servers believing they were dealing with approximately 800 child porn files. They soon discovered that the number was much larger, and represented one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of data – more than the OPP had the capacity to store at the time.

According to police, the website hosted by YesUp had 60,000 registered users, nearly 20,000 of whom paid for “premium” subscriptions which allowed them faster download speeds and other perks. Files from the site had allegedly been downloaded more than 19 million times.

Police believe this is the first time in Canada that charges have been laid against people affiliated with a web hosting company in relation to the content of one of their clients.

“This investigation should serve as a wake-up call for those who victimize our children,” OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique said at the press conference.

“Not only are police taking out the customers who abuse children online, we’re taking down the infrastructure that holds their monstrous content.”

All five men were arrested last week. They were identified Thursday as 52-year-old Chin Choi (Peter) Kok of Richmond Hill, Ont., 31-year-old Wen (Larry) Li of Toronto, 47-year-old Sui Hua (Jeff) Ye of Aurora, Ont., 40-year-old Zhen He (Patrick) Zeng of Richmond Hill and 42-year-old Zhen Yu (Jeff) Zeng of Richmond Hill.

They face charges ranging from making child porn available to access child porn to failure to report child pornography. Canadian law mandates that internet service providers must report all instances of child pornography they discover.

“We believe they were aware that child pornography was being hosted on the website,” MacDonald said.

A Canada-wide warrant has also been issued for a sixth man, whose identity has not been released publicly and who is believed to be in Vietnam.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/web-ho...site-1.4474486

20,000 paid subscribers and 60,000 registered users holy fuck!

So I take it the 20,000 CP subscribers are all going to be going to jail soon to, that's a lot more Trump supporters not voting in 2020 :thumbsup

I hope they round up every one of those fuckers. Gonna be some sleepless nights in 20k homes.

I'm shocked that they got their first tip on the site in 2012 and it took them 7 years to make a bust. WTF?

If the host knew they were hosting it, then by all means they should be held accountable..

7 fucking years like wtf bribe stop coming or what...

File host in question was called LumFile -- Vietnamese authorities arrested its operator back in 2012, I believe.

I saw that - there may be more to it than meets the eye.

Perhaps they were setting up a larger sting investigation, who knows.

No matter what - 7 years is a long time to let the child porn proliferate even if it resulted in more arrests.

Hopefully they will rot in prison.

“week. They were identified Thursday as 52-year-old Chin Choi (Peter) Kok of Richmond Hill”

I think Chin Kok will have a lot of kok on his chin ...

Why shouldn't web hosting facilities be held more accountable for what they host?

Sites with child porn on are easy to detect, as are some others. Just take them off, the excuse we don;t know doesn't cont when you add because we don't look.

That's just horrific. Good riddance.

The facility has no idea what the hosts using their facilities are hosting. Unless they sell hosting directly.

If its reported to them then by all means lock them up if they fail to act.

yep those canadians are total sleaze, all they do is watch kiddy porn and complain about US politics :thumbsup

probably just enjoying the free membership :winkwink:

I said that to someone yesterday after reading about this. I think they wanted to nail as many people as possible.

I’d think that they were logging every trade offer and sales offer as well as people offering kids for pictures and videos.

I hope they get the membership list and grab every person that was doing something wrong. I’ve never been to a kid porn site or forum but would view the forums to see what kind of filth was active. Then again, you’d probably have to register to view it and I’m not going to do that, even with an untraceable email address.

Web hosts would need hundreds of employees to search their servers daily for illegal materials. If monitoring for new images on the account, they will still need them for reviewing the content.

Not necessarily - I'd think it would depend on the size and scope of the webhosting service.

The story said there was at least a petabyte of images on the hosting service - one would think with that vast amount of content the webhosting company would be just a little curious what the content was.

I have difficulty believing they were blind to it...for seven years.

:thumbsup

It doesn't take long for a web host to check what's on their servers. Making the hosting company also liable would soon force them to.

I know the way the law currently works but it's unfit for the time we live in.

Checking every image and video upload isn't what's needed and pointless as the users will self regulate. Especially if they risk getting canned. Checking to see if a site is dedicated to CP and other illegal content is necessary.

bumping non-political threads to the front page