URL analysis
Having first identified this trend in 2022, we’ve continued to see child sexual abuse material being distributed by offenders prolifically posting links to dedicated commercial sites.
These links are frequently shared in chat rooms related to child sexual abuse, but also on unrelated platforms easily accessible to the public, like social media sites and popular blogs.
The linked sites are ‘Invite Child Abuse Pyramid’ sites, or ICAP sites for short. These custom-built websites incentivise users to share links to child sexual abuse sites far and wide in a ‘scattergun’ approach, with the aim of recruiting as many buyers as possible.
The criminals running the sites benefit from increased web traffic and additional income, with offenders potentially buying further videos of child sexual abuse and creating their own links to spam to others.
The chart above shows the number of reports identified as ICAP sites.
A total of 6,966 reports of ICAP sites were identified as containing child sexual abuse images.
A high proportion of these reports at the time that the public had reported them to us had already been actioned by our analysts. Even when our analysts have already assessed and actioned a URL, any further instances of the same URL being reported by the public are recorded as 'previously actioned' reports.
Having first identified these sites in July 2022, we have since tracked their evolution and shared the intelligence we have gathered with our partners in law enforcement and virtual currency services. We are working with industry partners, law enforcement agencies and other hotlines by providing training and sharing our insights in order to address the challenges that this method of sharing child sexual abuse content presents.