Police around the globe have wrapped up the largest child sex abuse case in history after three years of investigation into the website boylover.net. One hundred eighty-four arrests have already been made in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe, with 230 child victims "safeguarded" by authorities. Four hundred more suspected sex abusers are still being sought.

The investigation began back in 2007, when boylover.net came to the attention of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre. CEOP soon learned that the Australian Federal Police had independently identified and begun investigating boylover.net; the two agencies joined forces. By the time they were through, the case would also involve US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the New Zealand Police, Europol, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with additional arrests carried out by police departments in Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Spain.

According to authorities, boylover.net tried to stay legal by hosting only "discussions" about its members' sexual desires. But members used the site to make contact with one another, after which they "would move to more private channels such as e-mail in order to exchange and share illegal images and films of children being abused."

Investigators infiltrated the site, looking for "those members who were assessed as posing the highest risk to children." (An Australian paper notes that Aussie police would assume the online identities of men they had just arrested in order to keep suspicions down.) What they found horrified them, and allegedly went well beyond just online picture exchanges; several members were involved in "offline offending," and it was data from this investigation that led to the arrest of UK nationals in Thailand back in 2008. The men were suspected of committing child sex abuse in the country.

While investigators were posing as site members, police also tracked down the boylover.net server to a physical location in the Netherlands. At that point, both the local Zaanstreek-Waterland Police and Europol were brought into the case. Official descriptions from CEOP and Europol are sketchy on what happened next, but police at least got access to the server and made a copy of its hard drive.

Europol analysts helped complete the case. In January 2010, they used a copy of the server's hard drive to rebuild the boylover.net forums offline, and they then "forensically interrogated the server," apparently looking for IP addresses of members. Europol then sent out 4,202 intelligence reports to police in 33 countries, the police tracked down local members, and the global door kicking-in accelerated. (Arrests had been made since at least 2009 as specific information became available.)

Results of the massive investigation were not revealed until yesterday, so some cases have already progressed through the court system. In Australia, for instance, local media reports say that several child sex abuse suspects have already been sentenced. The Sydney Morning Herald notes that these cases went far beyond pictures and videos.

"A 25-year-old Sydney man from Eastwood was sentenced to eight years in 2010 on multiple charges including three counts of having sex with a child, while Victorian Bryan Cooper is serving seven years for procuring boys for sex," said the paper's report. "Sydney man David Anthony Hudson, 40, from Russell Lea, was jailed for his role in an international child sex tourism ring and is spending a minimum five years and seven months in jail for offenses against a Thai teenager George Iliakis, a former teacher from exclusive Brighton Grammar in Melbourne, sent videos and pictures of young boys to other members of the ring, which at its height had 70,000 members. Iliakis, who is serving a minimum two-year sentence, handcuffed and gagged boys before photographing them for his sexual gratification."

Four Australian children were rescued from members of the network.

In New Zealand, six suspected pedophiles were arrested and three children were rescued. In Canada, two arrests were made. In the UK, CEOP identified 240 suspects and has been working with police to arrest them. So far, it says, "The UK suspects in this operation are aged between 17 and 82 and come from all walks of life. They include police officers, scout leaders and teachers."

Dutch police believe they have the site's ringleader, a 37 year old from the town of Krommenie. Identified only as "Amir I," he appeared in a Haarlem court on Tuesday.

Boylover.net has been closed.