Massive Child Porn Sting Was Based on Bad Evidence

A massive child porn sting that targeted more than 7,000 Brits, including The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, was built on shaky and inconclusive evidence, says investigative reporter Duncan Campbell in an expose for The Guardian. Many of the men were targeted after their credit card numbers showed up in transaction records for porn sites. According to the article, 39 men have committed suicide since authorities began pointing fingers.

Now Campbell, an expert witness for the defense, says that thousands of cases involved credit card numbers that were stolen or that involved visits to web sites that contained only adult pornography. He also says that some suspects who supposedly registered for some sites never visited them.

Known as Britain's biggest cybercrime investigation, Operation Ore began with a raid on a Texas-based pornography portal, Landslide.com, that fed traffic to other sites. U.S. Postal Inspectors who conducted the raid passed credit card details of British citizens to UK authorities. But Duncan says no one bothered to consider whether the card numbers had been used by someone other than their legitimate owners.

Late in 2006, copies of six hard drives seized from Landslide were flown to Britain to be examined by defence computer experts (including myself). They showed that Landslide had been plagued by a range of credit card fraud rackets, known in the industry as Card Not Present (CNP) frauds.

Landslide's computers also contained 54,348 sets of stolen credit card information, including information on dozens of UK residents apparently stolen from a Florida-based luxury goods company; some were later used to pay for porn websites operated by Landslide. The company whose customer data were stolen, Levenger Inc of Delray Beach, Florida, has declined to comment.

Here's a story that describes how Townshend got caught in the sting.