Twinkle, Babyheart, & Lubasa

I'm still under the impression from the documentary I watched yesterday and two particular episodes from it wouldn't leave my mind, so I'm just going to write this to purge and share this knowledge with anyone who cares to know. Fair warning: this is really heavy.

So, the documentary Don't Look Away is all about sex traffickers and abusers of children on the Dark Web, a non-traceable part of the Internet that operates using TOR-based forums. TOR stands for The Onion Router -- the system where data are wrapped in multiple layers of encryption, like layers of an onion. Users only know one step up and one step below them, and never realize the scale or the structure of the entire network. That allows them to keep their identities and operations safe and secret. Here's a good visual representation of the TOR:

The documentary features a group of international investigators who infiltrate the Dark Web children's sex trafficking and abuse networks, trying to figure out who the users are and where they are located physically so that they could make arrests and find the victims.

It is estimated that Dark Web now hosts millions of kiddie porn and abuse users all over the world. They are loosely organized into large nodes, or forums that are operated by several admins in different countries. They trade photos and videos of child sex abuse, and build entire "support communities" on the Dark Web.

A big break in the investigation came when the officers focused on one user nicknamed Twinkle. He started a forum titled "Babyheart" where he shared a lot of content where he himself (!) molested and raped his own children, an infant and a toddler. The lead investigator, DHI officer Squire, described this as hardest to watch, unspeakable crimes. "Babyheart" became so popular that it grew from several hundred to a couple hundred thousand users in just a matter of months.

The investigators took months to figure out where Twinkle was based, and they were able to do so because he had a skin condition on his hand (vitiligo?) that often got into his pictures and videos and connected him to a Facebook page that had pictures of the same hand. The officers tracked him to a farmhouse in a small town in Portugal, sleeping with his two children in his bed when they arrested him. He turned out to be a young thin guy later identified as Nuno Melo, a sexual predator who ultimately was sentenced to 7 (!) years in prison for producing illegal material involving sexual abuse of children.

Why only seven years, you'd ask? Because when Twinkle was arrested he was so scared for his life that he fully cooperated with the investigators, told them everything he knew, and led them to other two super users, The Forgotten and Lubasa.

Lubasa presented the most interest to the officers. He was next level, known to operate 6-11 largest child sexual abuse forums with about a million users. Twinkle called him the "Big Boss," and the officers referred to him as a "master puppeteer" of the Dark Web. A tip came from a partner investigative group, and he was located in Recife, Brazil.

Lubasa's arrest on June 6, 2019 was recorded and shown in the documentary. That scene will stay with me for a long time because it shatters all stereotypes of sinister pedophiles operating at the global level. They often present themselves to their brethren as if they are kings of the world, people who made it and live luxurious life with impunity.

He was sleeping when the police turned up at his apartment. They woke him up and immediately arrested. The guy turned out to be a heavy set stereotypical computer nerd with glasses and soft hands. Even though his face was blurred in the documentary, you could tell he was young, and the police officers described him as a young guy under 30. He was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt with USSR on it, which tickled my Soviet-attuned radar.

At first, he didn't want to talk to the police. He didn't resist, just sat there in the chair, keeping silent. The officers kept asking him for the list of websites he was running, and he'd just pretend to be dumb, asking questions like, "What?" and "Where?" He broke when the lead investigator said that he knew Lubasa was running 11 sites and he would find more sooner or later. That's when Lubasa started writing down the list.

While pressing him to talk, the officers showed his apartment. It was a cramped one-bedroom place, with a large pile of garbage bags in the hallway and a small kitchen that was so dirty and smelly that even the officers said, "you'd have to be here to understand how bad it is." The kitchen sink was full of unwashed dishes with rotting food, and right next to it there was a big bucket of what looked like piss. People who live on the Dark Web 60-80 hours a week are notorious for not even getting up to go to the bathroom and keep big containers next to them that they can use to urinate.

Lubasa did not even have a bed set up in his filthy apartment, a squalor as Officer Squire called it. He must have been sleeping right there in his "office" on the reclining gaming chair. But you know what he had? A $2K computer and numerous hard drives with kiddie porn. That's probably where he invested all his money into, along with several servers the officers confiscated.

They blurred Lubasa's face in the documentary because they needed to keep his identity and arrest secret, not to scare off other pedophiles in his networks. Data recovered from Lubasa's servers helped international authorities track down victims and arrest other members of his network in Portugal, United States, Russia and other countries. His identity is still not fully disclosed, even though it is known that he was sentenced to 266 years in prison. He is not getting out of there alive.

As Officer Squire said, the new times bring to life new criminals. Today's sex traffickers are not your run-of-the-mill child molesters, creepy middle-aged men with no families and boring jobs. They are mostly young computer guys, IT and digital security experts who know how to operate Dark Web. Even Lubasa kept repeating, "I'm not a pedophile, I just trade photos and videos they crave." And that's the scary part: the officers know that they will never be done with their work. This criminal space is like a hydra, you cut one head off and another one grows in its place.

They are just hoping to contain it, locate the criminals, and save the child victims.

The full documentary is here, if you can stomach it: