An enormous paedophile exploitation platform with a large presence in European countries and with 2 million users has been dismantled.

A major Europol police operation led by the German police and involving officers from 38 countries has brought down the trade in videos of child sexual abuse on a site on the so-called darknet.

The platform, which they called ‘Kidflix’, allowed users to view 91,000 videos, a total of 6,300 hours of criminal content. Some participants in the network not only viewed the material but also recorded or distributed it in exchange for privileges.

“By uploading Child Sexual Abuse Materials, verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos, offenders could earn tokens, which were then used to view content”, explained Europol. “Each video was uploaded in multiple versions – low, medium and high quality – allowing criminals to preview the content and pay a fee to unlock higher quality versions”.

Digital crime with real victims

This is the biggest operation against child abuse in Europe to date and has allowed 39 minors to be placed under police protection.

1,400 users have been identified (many of them repeat offenders), and thousands of mobile devices have been seized. In Germany alone, the police have raided 96 locations. In Spain, 16 people have been arrested.

The director of Europol, Catherine De Bolle, has emphasised the value of sharing information across national borders in a collaboration that makes it possible to combat online crimes that are difficult to trace. “There are real victims behind these crimes, and those victims are children. As a society, we must act to protect our children”.  

“A huge system of exploitation of defencelessness”

Commenting on the news, the director of Amar Dragoste, an organisation that fights against sexual exploitation, told Evangelical Focus: “Child sexual abuse, pornography and the exploitation of minors are part of the same industry where extreme vulnerability and defencelessness are exploited”.

According to Carolina Sánchez, there is a need to “talk much more about all this, to make the phenomenon visible, to make the news go viral as it is now that talk about how the networks of child sexual exploitation operate and how all these unscrupulous predators gain access in exchange for money”.

The expert, who coordinates the NGO giving refuge to victims of sexual exploitation in Spain, emphasises the importance of “international cooperation and the mobilisation of numerous human and material resources” to dismantle this network and its hidden platform.

For the many other crimes of the same nature “that have yet to be discovered”, the “collaboration of citizens, administrations, countries and civil society is absolutely essential”.

Carolina Sánchez also calls for more “investigation, coordination, prevention and awareness-raising” as well as “much tougher laws in all countries” to “punish all these crimes so that there is no room for impunity”.

The countries involved

The macro-operation against ‘Kidflix’ was closed in March 2025 and began in 2022. The European countries that participated are Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.