Microsoft today joined Visa, Mastercard and Paypal and Europol
in setting up a coalition to track and trace the criminals who
trade in child pornography on the internet through their online
financial transactions.
The European Financial
Coalition aims to set up a clearing house to share information
related to payments for online transactions involving criminal acts
with children. Europol is likely to house the sharing platform for
national police forces, payment services operators, non-government
organisations and others to exchange data.
Launching the initiative today in London, European Commission
vice-president Jacques Barrot said the number of European websites
that trade in pornographic images of children has risen four-fold
since 2003.
He said the European Commission would spend €55m between 2009
and 2013 to make the internet safer for families and children. Some
€17m would go to fund pilot projects to fight online crime,
including child pornography.
Jim Gamble, who heads the UK's
Child Exploitation and Online
Protection Centre (Ceop), which is a founder member of the EFC,
said Internet Watch Foundation research suggests there are 2,500 to
3,000 websites with such pictures, but only around 250 trade
actively at any one time.
Conny Svensson, Mastercard's manager for government affairs in
Brussels, said criminals are becoming more cunning because of
measures the payment card industry has taken to stop trade.
He said some use wire transfer shops, while others divert users
to a legitimate website where they pay for innocent goods but also
receive a password that allows them to look at or download child
porn. He hopes more payment services companies will join the
coalition.
Gamble said Ceop was succeeding in using tactics formerly used
to track down terrorists in the hunt for paedophiles and child sex
traders, because some set up secret or semi-legitimate websites and
conducted transactions in secret or in code.
The centre has identified about 50 of more than 300 children
rescued from paedophiles from online images, he said.
Gamble said Ceops would use "any method" to infiltrate and
attack such groups to "eradicate" child pornography.
Svensson said the problem is international and covers many
jurisdictions. This makes law enforcement difficult, he said, but
most police forces are more than willing to try.
He said Mastercard is compiling a dossier of all the European
national legislation and procedures set down to enable law officers
to investigate, prosecute and convict offenders. It will donate
this to the "platform" that Europol will set up.
He said the EFC would also debate how to handle trades using
stolen or cloned cards, the invasions of privacy that might arise
as a result, how to share data without breaking data protection
laws, and other technical issues.
A spokesman for the EFC said he expects Europol to use data
profiling techniques to identify criminals.