Child Porn Live Streams And Sex Tapes Are Growing Cyber Crimes, Europol Says

The live streaming of child pornography is on the rise in Europe. The cyber crime targets vulnerable children who fall victim to sexual predators, the European Union’s law enforcement agency announced Wednesday.

Europol released a list detailing eight trends that are becoming the norm in the underworld of cybercrime in some EU countries. Among them was online child sexual abuse. “The use of end-to-end encrypted platforms for sharing media, coupled with the use of largely anonymous payment systems, has facilitated an escalation in the live streaming of child abuse,” the report said.

Live streaming of child sex abuse “involves a perpetrator directing the live abuse of children on a [pre-arranged] specific time frame through video sharing platforms,” Europol said in its 72-page report. “The abuse can be ‘tailored’ to the requests of the soliciting offender[s] and recorded.”

Most of the illegal activities take pace in the Darknet, according to the annual cyber organized crime assessment report released at Europol Headquarters in The Hauge. The Darknet was described as something that “continues to enable criminals involved in a range of illicit activities, such as the exchange of child sexual exploitation material.”

The report also warned of other threats: “The extent to which extremist groups currently use cyber techniques to conduct attacks are limited, but the availability of cybercrime tools and services, and illicit commodities such as firearms on the Darknet, provides opportunity for this to change.”

Another cyber crime known as “revenge porn" is also seeing an increasing presence online. It consists of the release of sexually explicit images online without the consent of the other person in order to cause the victim distress or harm.

Europol plans to distribute informational videos into schools across Europe that will spotlight the growing cyber crimes. In the past, child abuse videos were initially streamed in Southeast Asia but recent reports have shown that it has begun to spread to other countries.