A pedophilia social network active on Telegram, a multi-faceted criminal organization that included Italians: among them , a sixty-year-old resident of the metropolitan city of Cagliari, arrested and taken to prison in Uta, and a thirty-three-year-old from the capital, investigated for possession of images of minors . A system comparable in structure to a multinational corporation: this is what the Postal Police discovered during an investigation by the Rome Anti-Mafia Unit that led to the arrest of 17 people, ten of whom were caught red-handed.

The arrests were made in several regions: in addition to Sardinia, the measures were carried out in Lombardy, Veneto, Puglia, and Campania. One of the leaders was arrested in Switzerland. The group's managers ranged in age from 22 to 28.

The numbers emerging from the investigation are frightening: 34,000 images and over 20,000 videos were identified by investigators, who seized approximately 282.9 gigabytes of illegal material. The victims are very young: investigators even identified photos of children as young as 4 years old.

The investigation began in 2024 following a tip from the U.S. agency Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which identified a private group called "New Saga." Through analysis of cryptocurrency transactions, investigators were able to identify one of the group's administrators and launch a complex undercover operation.

Over the course of over a year of work, Postal Service agents managed to infiltrate the criminal groups, gaining the trust of their administrators and securing positions of high responsibility within the network. This allowed them to monitor the activities of the groups from within, as they were constantly re-created under different names to evade law enforcement. One of these groups was dubbed "The Hall of Kings," underscoring the power structure within which the Telegram group administrators believed they were operating.

The organization was highly structured and comprised of various individuals with specific tasks: group management, promotion of illicit activities, server and cloud service administration, content moderation, and the development of automated IT tools to ensure network continuity even in the event of channel closures. Monthly subscriptions for "users" ranged from $3 to $9.

"We are witnessing an unspeakable trafficking of minors," commented Rome's prosecutor, Francesco Lo Voi. "It was a particularly important investigation, and not just because of the numbers. What we uncovered was an organization with a structure comparable to a multinational corporation, with key figures performing administrative functions," he added, emphasizing that it is "a horrendous criminal phenomenon" and that the "disheartening" fact is the very young age of the organization's members .

(Unioneonline)

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