Steven Chase—creator of the world’s most notorious darknet child pornography site, Playpen—was sentenced to 30 years in prison earlier this week.

By comparison, his two co-defendants pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 20 years each earlier this year for their involvement in Playpen. According to the plea agreement of one of Chase’s co-defendants, David Browning, Playpen hosted 215,000 user accounts and distributed 50,000 images and videos of child pornography before the site was taken down.

A Friday press release published by the FBI notes that Chase launched the website in the summer of 2014, and the FBI rapidly began an investigation. However, the FBI was stymied by the fact that the site was hosted on a Tor-hidden service for a few months. But the feds eventually caught a lucky break and received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency, which included Chase’s true IP address.

"From that point we took normal investigative steps—seized a copy of the website, served search warrants for e-mail accounts, followed the money—and everything led back to Steven Chase," said FBI Special Agent Dan Alfin in the Friday statement.

The statement also touted the fact that as a result of the Playpen bust, hundreds of people in the US have been arrested, dozens more were prosecuted, and 55 American children have been "successfully identified or rescued." More than 500 additional people associated with the site have been arrested overseas.

However, the statement did not describe how the FBI seized Playpen's server in North Carolina in February 2015. The agency then ran the site and used malware for two additional weeks to monitor its users. In a handful of instances since, the government has dropped prosecutions rather than disclose the malware source code it used to discover the true IP addresses of Playpen users.