Childs Play [sic] was a website on the darknet featuring child sexual abuse material that operated from April 2016 to September 2017, which at its peak was the largest of its class. The site was concealed by being run as a hidden service on the Tor network. After running the site for the first six months, owner Benjamin Faulkner of North Bay, Ontario, Canada, was captured by the United States Department of Homeland Security. For the remaining eleven months the website was owned and operated by the Australian Queensland Police Service's Task Force Argos, as part of Operation Artemis.
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The website was run by Australian police for 11 months, and involved impersonation of the forum owner WarHead (Faulkner's alias), which required police to regularly post child abuse images, in order to convince users that the site was not compromised. Ivar Stokkereit, a legal adviser to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Norway, stated this was "a clear violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, even though the police’s intention is to prevent new offenses in the long run". Amnesty International...