The one-story industrial building at 565 Gordon Baker Rd. in North York is an innocuous slice of 1970s taupe.
But cops say that inside were 32 gigantic computer servers satisfying the darkest desires of some of the world’s sickest monsters.
On Thursday, the OPP announced they had arrested five men who were allegedly involved with the web hosting company as part of a five-year probe.
“People from around the world were seeing, basically, advertising for this website and were discovering really intense child porn,” OPP Det. Insp. David MacDonald told reporters.
“These are not simple images of children in bathing suits. These are really, really horrific.”
Police have also issued a Canada-wide warrant for a Vietnamese national who was the administrator behind the child pornography website.
Among the facts of the case:
- The servers had an eye-popping 934 terabytes of capacity.
- The child pornography website had nearly 60,000 registered users; 11,910 of them have been identified.
- The users were in 116 countries; the child victims, every colour and creed.
- There were more than 19,000 child pornography files on the servers and they had been downloaded a heartbreaking 19 million times.
“A supplier is akin to a drug dealer. Users pay for their child porn the same as a drug addict,” retired child exploitation investigator Keith Daniels told the Toronto Sun from his Florida home.
“They can’t get enough even if it is free, they always search for more unused, if you will, material. Even if they have to pay, they seem to think that there is a level of anonymity that goes with the payment. It doesn’t.”
MacDonald alleged that the men — affiliated with a company called YesUp Media — knew the servers contained tens of thousands of violent pornographic images of children.
The operation came to the attention of cops in 2012 from a tip to Toronto Police.
But unravelling the labyrinth of horror took years, until the arrests last week.
One of YesUp’s clients was the Vietnamese man who wanted to use the servers to host a site where users could upload and download child pornography.
Cops initially had no idea about the size and scope of the operation.
Users paid a “premium” price for their subscriptions to the site.
Daniels estimates that an operation of this size would be raking in millions of dollars.
“Perverts who want this stuff always want more, more, more, younger, younger, younger … and they’ll pay for it,” Daniels said, adding that even if each subscriber was paying $10, the bounty would be “breathtaking”.
Investigators believe the arrests mark the first time in Canada that charges have been laid against those associated with web hosting companies.
The five men arrested are: Chin Choi (Peter) Kok, 52, of Richmond Hill; Wen (Larry) Li, 31, of Toronto; Sui Hua (Jeff) Ye, 47, of Aurora; Zhen He (Patrick) Zeng, 40, of Richmond Hill; and Zhen Yu (Jeff) Zeng, 42, also of Richmond Hill.
They face charges for making child porn available; accessing child porn, and failure to report child pornography.
A Canada-wide warrant has also been issued for the website’s suspected owner, Vinh Van Nguyen, 35, who is believed to be in Vietnam.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
