Australian police secretly operated one of the dark web’s largest child abuse sites for almost a year, posing as its founder in an undercover operation that has triggered arrests and rescues across the globe.

The sting has brought down a vast child exploitation forum, Childs Play, which acted as an underground meeting place for thousands of paedophiles.

The police involvement was uncovered by journalists with the Norwegian newspaper, VG, who spent months tracing Childs Play’s origins and monitoring public posts.

The paper’s investigation, shared with the Guardian, led them to the offices of Queensland police’s Taskforce Argos, a specialist child abuse unit, in January.

Unwittingly, they had stumbled on to a sensitive police operation.

The Argos squad had quietly taken over Childs Play three months earlier, assuming the identity of its founder following his arrest for the rape of a four-year-old girl in the US.

To maintain their cover, undercover detectives were posting and sharing abuse material on Childs Play. Other users continued to post and view images while the site was under police control.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jon Rouse, the head of Taskforce Argos, a Queensland police unit that specialises in disrupting child sex abuse networks online. Photograph: Michael Safi/The Guardian

It was at least the second operation of its type conducted from the unit’s Brisbane headquarters.



Last year, the Guardian revealed Argos used a similar takeover to bring down Richard Huckle, dubbed Britain’s worst paedophile, and Shannon McCoole, an Australian state care worker whose arrest triggered a royal commission.

Childs Play’s scale made it significant on the dark web. The site was created in April 2016, and had attracted more than 1m user registrations by the time police took it offline last month.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 of those users were active, the Guardian understands.



About 100 “producers” filmed the rape of children and shared videos and imagery with the Childs Play “community”.

The Argos operation has now led to investigations by a dozen foreign countries into the site’s users.

The Argos commander, Insp Jon Rouse, said it had led to “significant rescues of children globally” and the arrest of “serious criminal child sex offenders”.

He said Tor, a program that masked users’ identities, attracted child sex offenders to sites such as Childs Play.

“The perceived anonymity and ‘safe haven’ that this environment allegedly provides facilitates the exchange of child exploitation material, it provides a platform for them to share their horrendous ideologies and it also is a vehicle for them to share methodologies to try to defeat law enforcement agencies,” Rouse told the Guardian.

“Our team, and units like ours across the world are singularly focused on stopping the sexual abuse of children and we will continue to work together to infiltrate, disrupt and dismantle child sex offender networks like this one,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taskforce Argos assumed the identity of Child dPlay’s founder after his arrest for the rape of a four-year-old girl in the US. Photograph: Michael Safi/The Guardian

The leader of the site, Canadian Benjamin Faulkner, is serving life behind bars for the sexual assault of the four-year-old in Virginia last year, which he committed alongside American Patrick Falte.



Taskforce Argos, working with European police and US Homeland Security, had been tracking the two men before the rape in Virginia. They got an alert that Faulkner had crossed the border, and knew he was likely to meet Falte.

The police soon pounced, arresting both at a home in Virginia.



Following the arrest, they moved the website to an Australian server, and the Argos unit assumed the identity of Faulkner. They began posting to the community, quickly apologising for the unexplained absence.

“Phew, what a month that was!. A month of my life that I won’t get back. Although technically most of the really screwed up shit happened in October, not September, hence my late foray into this month,” the team posted.



“Sorry again about the late arrival but I did ask the Staff team to step in and cover for me in my enforced absences.”

The forum’s community expected a monthly post from Faulkner. If it did not come, members would know the site was compromised.



Each of the posts was to end with an image of child exploitation, a measure thought to create a legal hurdle for undercover police. But no such hurdle exists in Australia, where legal protections allow police to post abuse material.

It puts them in an uncomfortable position. To prevent harm to children, detectives must share images of child exploitation.

The child protection advocacy group Bravehearts says the tactic poses difficult questions for police.

But its executive chair and founder, Hetty Johnston, is supportive of the Argos methodology, and says the team’s groundbreaking work is saving children from harm.

“I think it’s a tough question for everyone involved, and I know it’s a tough question for police,” Johnston said.

“But I support this 100% because the images that police would use would not be images that they create, they would be existing images. And the idea is to get to people who are currently sexually offending against children,” she said.



“This is a war, and we have to engage in the war. We have to engage in it.”



Johnston describes Argos’s work as groundbreaking and Rouse as “an absolute genius”.

“He should be Australian of the year, what he has to do, what he has to view, would send most of us absolutely stark raving mad,” she said.



The powers to share abuse material are not unique to Australia. But they are not available to many English-speaking law enforcement agencies.

The Argos squad is highly experienced and well resourced. That makes Australia a sound base from which to launch global child abuse investigations.

Falte and Faulkner first met online, but became better acquainted in 2015, through another child exploitation site. The next year, Faulkner created Childs Play.



The takeover: how police ended up running a paedophile site Read more

“With the security scares brought about recently [...] and the lack of good forums, I decided to bring Childs Play to the community,” Faulkner wrote, according to VG.



“The goal of Childs Play is to provide a simple free access forum to the community, while simultaneously allowing a safe and secure place to talk and just be ourselves.”

The Norwegian newspaper began monitoring the site in 2016. The paper’s IT expert, Einar Otto Stangvik, created a program that allowed him to download, index and analyse all the public messages on the forum.

In January, he found a weakness in the system that led him and journalist Håkon Fostervold Høydal to identify the website’s owner as Taskforce Argos.

Høydal met Argos investigator Paul Griffiths and Rouse in Brisbane. The paper then waited until Childs Play was offline before publishing their investigation on Saturday.

“After the meeting with Griffiths and Rouse, we understood that the journalists had discovered an ongoing police operation,” VG editor-in-chief Gard Steiro said.

“Although it was stunning news and obviously of public interest, we decided to hold off publishing what we knew. The situation was unclear. We needed more information before deciding what could be published. In a worst-case scenario, VG could have damaged the investigation and endangered innocent people.”