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Regional court in Frankfurt am Main: Four alleged backers of Boystown have to answer here from Wednesday
Photo: Dirk Sattler / IMAGO
The trial against four men who are said to have been responsible for the Darknet platform "Boystown" began at the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court on Wednesday.
The general public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt accused the defendants of, among other things, the gang distribution of so-called child pornography.
How drastic the allegations are was shown right at the beginning of the trial, when the court decided to exclude the public from parts of the reading of the indictment.
Around 400,000 users had registered on »Boystown«.
This made the internationally oriented site one of the largest abuse platforms on the dark web, a part of the internet that can only be accessed with special anonymization software.
The platform had chat areas in different languages and was divided into forums such as "Hardcore", "Kindergarten", a separate area for child abuse reports and one for image requests.
Mostly videos and pictures of sexualized violence against boys were exchanged and disseminated.
Hidden server in church facility
The four defendants, who have to answer in court in Frankfurt, are said to have operated the site and acted in part as administrators or administrators.
The IT technician Alexander G., for example, is said to have hidden a server in the rooms of a church institution and also used the high-performance Internet line there, as reported by "Zeit".
That server is said to have been used by the hard core of the German pedophile scene linked to »Boystown«.
G. is also said to have checked every two to three days whether the servers registered in the Republic of Moldova, on which the platform was operated as a whole, were working smoothly.
In the spring of 2020, he is said to have ordered more storage space for Bitcoin, which was then worth 329 euros, in order to be able to continue hosting the increasing amount of data.
The Catholic institution, for which G. maintained the IT as an external employee, explained that they only found out about the case through the investigation and that they support the authorities.
Christian K. is sitting in the dock next to G. in Frankfurt.
He is said to have taken care of the operation of the site from a small hut in the jungle of Paraguay.
It was delivered in October 2021.
Videos from the Paraguayan authorities show the access in a littered and simple shelter.
In addition, Andreas G. and Fritz K. still have to answer in court in the proceedings.
All of the accused are in custody.
Two of them are also accused of having abused children themselves.
Great investigative success for German authorities
In mid-March 2021, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office succeeded in taking Boystown offline after around a year and a half.
The action immediately caused considerable unrest in the online pedo-criminal scene, although the investigative authorities did not publicly announce their great success until the beginning of May.
Shortly after the platform was founded, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) apparently smuggled an undercover investigator into Boystown.
Nevertheless, the prosecutors could probably not identify any of the operators of the site, who only communicated with a pseudonym, for a long time.
(Read more about how undercover investigators investigate pedophiles here.) It was only thanks to a tip from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Dutch police that the Germans were able to intercept an administrator's data for weeks.
As reported by "Zeit", it was finally possible to identify one of the accused.
Abuse recordings are quickly back online despite being shut down
"Boystown" is one of the largest abuse platforms on the Darknet that has been excavated to date and is probably the largest site controlled from Germany.
Nevertheless, there were already larger pages on the Darknet, as a joint research by SPIEGEL and NDR in December 2021 showed.
At the time »Boystown« was shut down, there was a darknet platform with more than three million registered members.
Only five days after the attack on »Boystown«, many of the abuse images distributed there could be accessed again via this page.
An anonymous user uploaded a copy of parts of the deactivated page again.
The research by SPIEGEL and NDR showed that the BKA did not have the images deleted for a long time, although this would have been technically possible with simple means.
A few e-mails were enough to get the services that stored the recordings distributed on the dark web to be deleted.
As "Zeit" now reports, investigators have now approached providers in more than 600,000 cases and asked for the recordings distributed on "Boystown" to be deleted.
So it is to be hoped that with the end of "Boystown" as many abuse recordings as possible will actually disappear from the Internet.
Because the fact that they can continue to circulate on the Internet all too often means further suffering for the victims after the abuse.
With material from dpa