ICAP sites

First identified 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 even digital music apps.

To date, our Hotline has received thousands of reports using this method of distribution.

The table above shows the number of reports identified as ICAP sites. A high proportion of these reports at the time of reporting had already been actioned by our analysts. A total of 14,892 reports of ICAP sites were identified as containing child sexual abuse images.

These links lead to “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.

What can we do about this?

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 to address the challenges that this method of sharing child sexual abuse content presents.