Wonderland world of Internet porn

A Sussex link to a `routine’ US child abuse inquiry has led to the exposure of a global ring using KGB codes to hide in cyberspace. Stuart Millar reports

Even by the increasingly sophisticated standards of Internet child pornographers, the Wonderland club operated on a technological and organisational level which shocked investigating authorities around the world.

More than 100 people were arrested in 12 countries last week as police acted against the Wonderland club, described as one of the world’s most sophisticated paedophile rings. 

More than 100 000 indecent images of children, some of them as young as two, were uncovered during raids in the United States, Australia and European countries including Britain, Finland, Norway, Italy, Portugal and Germany. Officers believe members were among the most active child pornographers using the Internet.

Much like the most exclusive of private clubs, membership was on a strict invitation-only basis, with nominations having to be approved by senior figures within the organisation.

Status in the organisation, according to police, appears to have been based on whether individuals produced their own material, for example by abusing family members, or compiled their stock from Internet images.

The club restricted its membership to people already among the most active in cyberspace’s child sex scene. A basic criterion before candidates could be nominated for membership was that they possessed at least 10 000 images of child pornography. But not just any 10 000; many of them had to be different from any of those held by other members.

It is this aspect which most alarmed child protection agencies and police, and which sets the Wonderland club apart from previously uncovered paedophile rings.

`Just to get through the door, members had to already have access to an incredible number of images,” says Ruben Rodriguez, of the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. “I think we can conclude that we are talking about the hard core of Internet child pornographers.”

To protect its exclusivity, Wonderland’s network on the Internet was shielded by an extremely advanced security system.

Unconfirmed reports from the US claim it even used a code originally developed by the KGB to encrypt all its communications. As a result, Wonderland was able to exist in complete secrecy.

In the end, it was not the high-tech scanning and tracking of Internet sites which revealed the club’s existence; instead the mammoth global investigation, codenamed Cathedral, which led to the arrests was sparked by a US police investigation into a routine child abuse allegation.

In June 1996, the mother of a 10- year-old girl in a Californian farming community contacted police after her daughter complained that she had been abused by the father of a friend when she stayed at their house overnight.

Local detectives discovered that the man’s house contained digital equipment capable of broadcasting live pictures of abuse on the Internet.

Computer files containing pornography were also recovered. Shortly afterwards, another man was arrested and the FBI and US Customs were called in.

It emerged that the two men were part of an international paedophile ring, known as the Orchid Club, which was abusing children as young as five and broadcasting pictures on the Internet.

According to the California state indictment, the club’s activities included the videotaping of a five-year- old girl somewhere in the Midwest of America. At least 11 men had watched the child being abused live on the Internet. During the session they had sent requests to the man abusing her, detailing the abuse they wished to see.

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The investigation identified three Britons involved in the club, one of whom lived in Hastings, East Sussex.

Tipped off by US Customs, Sussex police raided his house and seized his computer equipment. It was only when this was being analysed that they uncovered the existence of the far bigger and more sophisticated ring which styled itself the Wonderland club.

After preliminary investigations, Sussex police handed the investigation to the National Crime Squad, which in turn passed information to police forces in 11 other countries.

Amid fears that children were being abused on a continuing basis, British police set a deadline for the investigation.

There was, however, still some way to go before arrests could be made. As well as being faced with the encryption system, the information from the Hastings computer identified not real people but merely a series of “screen names” - the nicknames they used to communicate.

Investigators in each country then had to link the screen name to an Internet service provider, which was contacted to establish the identity of the user. Most of the membership appears to have come from the US.

During the raids, police discovered computer images, video tape, photographs, and AVI (audio- visual) computer files which showed motion sequences of abuse. Unlike the Orchid Club, no evidence of live digital broadcasts was discovered in the US.

The swoop does not mark the end of the operation. Officers must now attempt to identify the children involved. Experts say the task will be made more arduous as it is difficult to tell how old an image is. A 10-year-old in a picture may now be 40.

The hope in the meantime is that operation Cathedral has halted the abuse.

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https://mg.co.za/article/1998-09-11-wonderland-world-of-internet-porn

The club members with the highest status were those who abused children themselves and made images of that abuse available to others. The most senior British member of Wonderland was Gary Salt, a former RAF engineer from Stockport. He made images of himself abusing three children - including one selection of pictures called the Hell Series - and distributed them in the club.

Some British members of Wonderland travelled to his home to exchange CDs of pictures and to meet the children he had assaulted. Salt was jailed for 12 years for child sex offences in 1999. David Hines, 30, Wonderland's senior channel operator in Europe and a friend of Salt, said: "Gary was doing what we all believed in. He wasn't just talking about it he was doing it." Hines, typically among paedophiles, had been abused as a child. "We didn't see it as abuse," he said. "These were children who were involved in relationships."

In all, more than 100 Wonderland members were arrested in Britain, America, Europe and Australia in a carefully synchronised swoop on Sept 2 1998. In Germany a senior civil servant was detained. In America, a university professor was among those held. Officers seized tons of computer equipment from which experts extracted 750,000 paedophilic images and 1,800 video clips. In Britain a seven-ton lorry was needed to transport the computer equipment taken from 15 addresses.

The operation is not yet over. A database of the 1,263 children featured in Wonderland images has been circulated by Interpol. Only 17 of those children have been positively identified, six of them in Britain. One child on the database is Rui Pedro Mendonca, 11, a Portuguese boy who was abducted three years ago on his way home from school and has not been seen since. It is feared that his abductors killed him after recording his abuse for the gratification of Wonderland members.

Det Supt Peter Spindler of the National Crime Squad said: "We have taken out the largest organised paedophile group on the network. They considered themselves the creme de la creme of paedophiles."

When the Wonderland members were sentenced at Kingston yesterday, they were told by Judge Kenneth Macrae they had used their computer know-how "to commit crimes decent people find unimaginable". His sentencing powers were significantly less than those of the American judge who dealt with Ronald Riva, the American whose abuse of eight-year-old Allison triggered the chain of events that brought about their downfall. He jailed Riva for 100 years.

2001

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1322551/Girl-8-raped-to-order-on-the-internet.html

Operation Cathedral was a police operation that broke up an international child pornographyring called The Wonderland Club operating over the Internet. It was led by the British National Crime Squad in cooperation with 13 other police forces around the globe,[1] who arrested 107 suspects (almost all simultaneously) across 12 countries on 1 September 1998. Seven UK-based men were convicted for their part in the ring in 2001.

One reason for the high profile of the operation was the unusually high number of images involved possessed and produced and distributed by Wonderland Club: 750,000 images with 1,200 unique identifiable faces. Despite substantial work by many of the agencies involved only a very small number of those appearing in the images have been identified. A total of 16 out of 1,263 different children depicted were identified: One from Chile, one from Argentina, 13 from either the United States or the United Kingdom, and one from Portugal. The Portuguese national was identified as Rui Pedro Teixeira Mendonça, an 11-year-old boy kidnapped in Lousada on March 4, 1998 and whose whereabouts are currently unknown.[18]

The investigation had been sparked by a tip-off from United States police investigating the rape of an eight-year-old girl broadcast live to pedophiles by webcam.[1] The international and highly organized nature of the ring has led to a much higher concern for the child sexual abuse that is child pornography.[

A pervert who masterminded a worldwide paedophile ring was caught viewing sick images of children in a public library – just months after being released from prison.

Gary Salt was the self-styled chairman of 'The Wonderland Club', was spotted up loading indecent pictures at Old Trafford Library.

Salt, originally from Stockport, was head of a network of depraved criminals across 13 countries which exchanged 750,000 pictures and 1,800 videos of youngsters suffering sexual abuse.

The 49-year-old was jailed for 12 years in 1998 and released in April last year. Today the MEN can reveal he is facing jail again. 

Old Trafford Library staff tipped off police who arrested Salt at the same library two days later, seizing mobile disk drives he was using at the time.

A search of the bail hostel where he was staying turned up further horrific material locked in a box in a wardrobe.

Salt – who changed his name to Anthony Andrews after his release last year – has now pleaded guilty to 25 charges of making, possession, distribution, and attempted distribution of indecent images of children.

He has also breached the conditions of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order which had been issued for an indefinite time.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/pervert-who-ran-infamous-wonderland-857088

POLICE were last night questioning a suspected Scots paedophile as part of Britain’s biggest-ever Internet child porn operation. 

The man’s home was one of 24 raided in dawn swoops by forces across Britain. 

Officers from Grampian Police seized a computer when they searched the house in Aberdeen. 

Twenty-six other computers and a huge haul of photos, videos and magazines, were taken away in the raids, involving more than 100 officers from 13 police forces. 

Most of the material is understood to feature sick scenes of children being raped and sexually abused. 

Two teachers were among those being questioned last night. 

The paedophile unit of the Metropolitan Police co-ordinated the swoops – codenamed Operation Janitress – on houses in Aberdeen, Derby, Liverpool, Hull, Hertfordshire, Reading, Leeds, Preston, Brighton and London. 

Met sources say they have smashed a huge child porn ring after two years of work and more arrests will follow. 

DCI Bob McLachlan, the head of the paedophile unit, said: “Those responsible believe that the Internet affords anonymity, but technology is increasingly sophisticated. 

“These are real innocent children having horrible and heartbreaking things done to them to gratify the sick minds of some people.” 

Last night, IT specialists were downloading and cataloguing thousands of pieces of material stored on disk. 

A trial last week revealed the extent of paedophile use of the Internet when seven British men admitted conspiracy to distribute child pornography at Kingston Crown Court in Surrey. 

The fee to join their organisation, known as the Wonderland Club, was 10,000 new child porn images. 

Police discovered the club’s members had access to almost a million child porn images and could even watch children in America being abused by perverts live via Webcam. 

The seven will be sentenced next month.

https://spidercatweb.blog/operation-janitress-the-wonderland-club

20 YEARS OF THE WONDERLAND INTERNET PEDO CLUB.

20 YEARS!!!

WONDERLAND.

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>>4675942

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>>4675931

Thanks for fixing the dates. I misread the last article.