Chase found guilty of six charges, awaits sentencing

Sep 17, 2016 15:40 GMT  ·  By

A US federal jury found Steven W. Chase, 57, of Naples, Florida, guilty of running Playpen, the largest Dark Web child pornography portal.

FBI agents arrested Chase on February 19, 2015, after receiving a tip about the website from fellow foreign law enforcement agents in December 2014.

Law enforcement investigators discovered that the TOR-based website was running on a misconfigured web server that leaked its real IP address. FBI agents tracked down the IP to a US web hosting company and, using its financial records, found and arrested Chase.

The FBI continued to run Playpen servers for 13 days

The FBI then moved the Playpen website to its own data center and continued to run the site from February 20 to March 4, 2015.

FBI agents hosted malware on the server that, after infecting the site visitor's computer, would ping back to FBI servers with details about the user's real IP and other information that could be used to reveal his identity and location.

When it was shut down, Playpen had over 215,000 users and hosted 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children as young as toddlers.

Over 100,000 Playpen users visited the site after the FBI took control of it. FBI officials said they managed to infect and get details of over 1,300 Playpen users. The agency shared these findings with other law enforcement agencies around the world and indicted 137 suspects in the US.

FBI criticized for the way it handled the Playpen investigation

The case has sparked controversy in the US because of the way the FBI deanonymized Playpen users and its secrecy around the malware it had used. Many suspects indicted in relation to this case are trying to have the evidence dismissed because the FBI doesn't want to reveal more details about the technique it used to gather its proof.

Chase now awaits sentencing for one count of engaging in a child exploitation enterprise, one count of advertising child pornography, three counts of transportation of child pornography, and one count of possession of child pornography.

The federal jury also ruled that he has to forfeit his house and any other monetary gains that derive from his criminal activity.

In December 2015, Playpen co-administrator Michael Fluckiger, 46, of Portland, Indiana, and moderator David Lynn Browning, 47, of Wooton, Kentucky, also pleaded guilty.