Thiruvananthapuram: In a statewide crackdown on child pornography, Kerala Police have arrested 41 people, including a doctor and IT specialists.
The raids were conducted on Sunday at 465 locations across the state under the "Operation P-Hunt" – an operation by the Kerala Police to nab those involved in seeking child-abuse materials on the net and particularly on the darknet.
In all the police have registered 339 cases on Sunday following the action. The arrested were booked under the IT (Information Technology) Act and POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act.
The police acted on credible intelligence of people circulating abuse materials of children between 6 and 15 years of age, stated Manoj Abraham, the nodal officer of Cyberdome, the Kerala Police's cybersecurity wing.
"This was the third such operation this year", added the officer who leads the mission. In the latest operation, the police seized mobilephones and electronic devices used for uploading and downloading the proscribed materials.
The modus operandi
The arrested were circulating child pornography via WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Each of the groups had over 400 members, the police said.
Most of them are IT experts and professionals. They have found to be using advanced techniques to hide their identities and clear their tracks. Some of them are suspected to have connection with child traffickers, they said.
They were also found to have been using spyware to leak information and webcam visuals from computers used by children. Most of them were smart enough to use innovative software to delete the videos after watching and they used to format their phones once in three days to make it difficult for the police to track the network.
Cyberdome has tracked these people by using a specialised software to gather IP addresses of their computer systems.
As many as 320 police teams were involved in the operation, which began on early Sunday morning.
Cybercrimes have skyrocketed during the lockdown period, the police added.
Cyberdome operations officers A Shyamkumar, R U Ranjith, A Azarudeen, S S Vaisakh, S Satheesh, K R Rajesh, A Pramod, R P Rajeev and Shyam Damodaran participated in the Sunday bust.
In last two years, 525 cases have been registered and 428 people have been arrested across the state in the anti-child pornographic operations, the police said.
