A child is seen sitting alone. Photograph: Jennifer A Smith/Getty ImagesExclusive: the inside story of a police operation that secretly took over a child abuse forum in a six-month sting, and the stunning breakthrough that led them to snaring Richard Huckle, ‘Britain’s worst-ever paedophile’
by Michael SafiIt was one of the world’s largest and most secure paedophile networks – an online space where tens of thousands traded horror.
The website dealt in abuse; video and images of children, swapped and boasted about on a dark-web forum, accessible only through an encrypted browser.
Membership was tightly managed. Quiet accounts raised suspicion and could be suddenly terminated. Those who stayed had to upload new material frequently. More than 45,000 people complied.
But what those thousands never realised, even as heavy users began to disappear, was that the site was being run by police.
For six months in 2014, inside a pale office block in the Australian city of Brisbane, an elite squad of detectives were administering the site: analysing images, monitoring conversations, connecting users with their crimes.
By the time they pulled the plug on the forum 85 children had been rescued and hundreds of people across the globe arrested.
Among them was Richard Huckle, a 30-year-old Briton living in Malaysia, one of the board’s most prolific members.
In June Huckle was sentenced to 22 life terms, one for each of the minors he was convicted of abusing.
Police believe he had at least 169 other young victims. Huckle had diligently recorded their names in a ledger, detailing the acts he had performed with each one.
How he was tracked and arrested is a story of persistence, good fortune and an audacious half-year sting, which key figures inside the specialist police unit responsible, Taskforce Argos in Australia, have granted the Guardian access to share.
The trail
The loose thread, that once pulled, would unravel Huckle’s world, leads back five years to Toronto, and the warehouse headquarters of businessman Brian Way.
The 42-year-old had built a child-abuse film distribution racket worth $4m, which to this day is among the largest ever discovered.
When Canadian police raided his premises they found it piled with refuse, the bathroom sheeted in thick mould. The disarray was typical of a predator’s home.
But Way, who was later convicted of 15 charges related to child abuse images and is awaiting sentencing, kept meticulous records. About a tenth of his 370 customers were based in Queensland. Their details were passed onto Insp Jon Rouse, the grave 52-year-old who commands Taskforce Argos.
Rouse came up through the Queensland police’s child safety group, where he investigated parents who had killed or mistreated their children, before joining Argos in 2000. “When we’re dealing with a video, when you hear children screaming, we’re listening for accents, trying to identify where that abuse is occurring,” he says. “Our job is to investigate it and end it.”
Now one of the world’s largest paedophile networks was being run from the Brisbane headquarters of the Queensland policeHis stern mask drops momentarily recalling “the very first time I saw a video of a child being penetratively raped”. “I could not believe it,” he says. “I was so shocked.”
But to survive you need to “get past your abhorrence and horror”, he says. “At the end of the day the best way to deal with this is to see it as digital evidence of the commission of a criminal offence against a child.”
After Way’s capture, dozens of arrests across Queensland followed, including of one man who subscribed to a site Argos had yet to unearth: a vast, highly organised forum, whose name is still suppressed under a strict court order.
“One of the Queensland targets was a member,” Rouse says. “When we arrested him we took over his account.”
At that stage “we were just another user”, Rouse says.
Police discovered an intricate hierarchy operating on the site.
“It ran as a company or business,” Rouse says. Senior administrators took charge of individual boards, grouped around categories such as boys or girls, hardcore or non-nude. Users had to upload material at least every 30 days or risk exile. Each of its 45,000 accounts were ranked according to the quality of their output, with a “producer’s area” walled off to all but the most feted. At the top was one man, “effectively the CEO”. He regularly started his messages with the cheery greeting “hiyas”.
Paul Griffiths, a police officer from England with a cropped haircut and a hard stare, worked on Argos in Queensland as a victim identification specialist, scanning gigabytes of images and videos each week looking for clues – a brand of food, a grain of wood – that might give away a child’s location. Above his desk was a whiteboard scrawled with two dozen usernames: the forum’s most wanted.
Huckle’s name made the whiteboard because he was a producer, uploading exclusively fresh material. He was zealous about it. “He belittled others [on the forum] for claiming they were paedophiles,” Griffiths recalls. “He thought they were just sitting at home living off other people’s experiences, where he was out there living the life.”
“[Huckle] talked about leaving a legacy, where he’d be remembered because of the material he produced,” Griffiths says. “He got to the point where he was actually titling his work, saying it was his studio. He was definitely branding.”
To Huckle’s frustration, however, his material was not sought after. “You’ve got the fact he wasn’t particularly popular, he was very arrogant,” Griffiths says.
Huckle took precautions, usually blurring faces and backgrounds, and erasing telltale metadata from his work. Advice, including on how to evade police detection, was readily available on the site. One 180-page manual billed itself as “the exclusive step by step guide for practicing safe and fun sex with children”. Huckle had authored his own 60-page tome, titled “Paedophiles and Poverty: Child Lover Guide”.
The search
In Brisbane, police laboured over the word “hiyas”, the word use by the site’s de facto CEO. “It didn’t really look like something that I’d use, or that anyone I know would use in conversation,” Griffiths says. When he punched it into Google, it returned thousands of hits. “All the people I could see using it as a greeting were women.”
Danish authorities had already supplied Argos thin leads that the site’s kingpin was somewhere in Australia, probably Adelaide. Some of the children in the work he produced were clearly Indigenous. In one of his images, a small girl was splayed on a bed, a sheet of paper beside her reading, “Aussie”.
I thought, this is just spooky. It’s just too much of a coincidence not to be himPaul GriffithsA web search for “hiyas” turns up more than 450,000 results. The odds against police in these investigations are stacked extraordinarily high. What improves them is a basic truth about the people they hunt. “They will make mistakes,” Griffiths says.
The man behind the site made at least three, that in time, would lead police crashing through his door. A man was discovered using the giveaway greeting on a four-wheel drive discussion forum. He lived in Adelaide. Griffiths’ eyes went wide at his username. It was a close copy of the handle used by the forum’s chief.
Another similarly named user – liberally sprinkling his posts with “hiyas” – was also discovered on a basketball forum. “And I thought, this is just spooky. It’s just too much of a coincidence not to be him,” Griffiths says.
The user on the four-wheel drive forum had asked for advice on raising his car’s suspension. People had replied suggesting parts. “I actually found someone on Facebook who was trying to source those parts [the user] had been advised to use,” Griffiths recalls.
It was a 32-year-old named Shannon McCoole. He worked in childcare. “Suddenly it all fell into place,” Griffiths says. “It was a battle stations moment.”
Police moved on McCoole in June 2014. Though news of his arrest was initially suppressed, the fact he worked in state care would eventually trigger a royal commission. It revealed a long trail of red flags raised by McCoole’s colleagues over the four years he spent volunteering for youth services and and eventually working for Families South Australia.
They included an anonymous call in March 2011 warning authorities the then-nanny was inappropriately physical with some children. It was ignored, along with a psychological assessment one year later, that found him to be “high risk” and “very unsuitable” for the job. Considering these misses elicits the rarest flash of emotion from Rouse. “Looking at the timeline, it’s quite horrendous,” he says. “It’s sickening. But it’s history now.”
McCoole was jailed to face court, but online, his presence barely faltered. Two officers had immediately assumed control of his account. This was in a different league from the earlier takeover of a Queensland account. Now one of the world’s largest online paedophile networks was suddenly being run from the Brisbane headquarters of the Queensland police.
The trap
In Greek myth, Argos Panoptes was a giant who served as a guard for the queen of the gods, Hera. The beast had one hundred eyes, never closing all at once. “Ever vigilant,” Rouse says.
For six months in 2014 Task Force Argos was all-seeing too, with access as McCoole to the forum’s every crevice, and the private messages of all 45,000 users.
Including Richard Huckle’s.
He had hashtagged the airline. It was almost too easyPaul GriffithsHis messages provided early clues the man from Kent might not be preying on children in south Asia after all. He had still been careful never to name a country. But to a paedophile based in the Philippines who wrote to him, “pity you’re so far away,” he had replied, “I’m probably closer than you think”.
As well, there was intelligence suggesting the offender had spent time in Malaysia.
Access to the full suite of Huckle’s material provided the breakthrough. It was not what he photographed, but what he photographed with. Embedded in some of his images, overlooked when he swept the files of metadata, was the brand and model of his Olympus camera. A tiny clue – but enough.
Officers exhaustively swept photography sites such as Flickr and TrekEarth for photos taken in south-east Asia using the make and model.
Sure enough, “we find some perfectly legal images from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, taken with the same make and model of camera”. The photographer also had a penchant for shooting children, sometimes naked, “but nothing illegal in them”, he says.
Police traced the legitimate photographs to an email address, which in turn illuminated his accounts on other websites. In an echo of McCoole’s case, one of these accounts was registered under a similar name to that of a paedophile on their site. “And realistically by that stage it was no chance he would be anyone else,” Griffiths says.
The digital trail also led to a studio named Huckool Photography Productions. It was based in Malaysia and linked to Huckle’s public Facebook profile. There, he had been more brazen than police could have imagined.
“On his photos on Facebook there were photos of similar children, and the same children, that appeared in the abuse material that he published online,” Griffiths says.
Some of Huckle’s profiles are still archived. They are a sea of children: in church, dressed as Christmas angels; knee-deep in water, beaming; bunched together, “delightedly over-excited [at] their English photographing uncle”, he writes. Some show more brooding glances, and you wonder.
Griffiths, who had worked as a police officer in his home city of Manchester, called his counterparts at Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA), passing on the raw intelligence about Huckle’s crimes and his likely identity. But Huckle would remain in Malaysia untouched for another four months.
“As I understand it, the Malaysians believed they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him,” Griffiths says. (Malaysian police say they were only notified of Huckle’s offending by the NCA in May 2016.)
They were so close. Police had an identity, a location, an array of online profiles. But no way to way to reach the man himself. Until Huckle provided one.
“I just saw a [Facebook] post he made, basically saying, ‘Great news, I’ve just booked a flight home for Christmas’,” Griffiths says. “He had hashtagged the airline. It was almost too easy.”
Huckle was arrested at Gatwick airport on 19 December 2014. Computers and hard drives in his possession contained more than 20,000 indecent images of children, around 1,000 depicting children he had himself abused. To this day he has refused to divulge the keys to encrypted files on his laptop, thought to reveal additional victims, and thousands more images and videos.
Huckle’s trial received sensational media coverage in the UK, including his branding as “Britain’s worst-ever paedophile”.
One guy posted … ‘Kudos. I chatted to McCoole for six months and didn’t realise it was the cops’Paul GriffithsThe endgame
Around the time Huckle was arrested in December 2014, undercover police posted a message from Shannon McCoole’s account to the forum. “[Forum name redacted] is a living creature,” it said.
“We have survived a lot of ups and downs. It’s been a passion of mine for a long time, and [forum name redacted] is bigger than ever.
“Believe it or not, the board doesn’t run itself and requires a lot of thankless hours from the admins, co-admins and mods. So the board will go into maintenance mode till the new year to give the admin team time to a break.
“[It] will return in 2015 refreshed and better than ever.”
After six months running the forum – gathering enough evidence to prosecute hundreds and rescue 85 victims – police were pulling the plug on site. For months before, as evidence was disseminated around the world, the most significant users were being picked off by police.
“Some of [the users] put it together before we closed the board,” Griffiths recalls. “People noticed people were disappearing. It’s an occupational hazard, and they usually assume when someone disappears they’ve been arrested. But when it keeps happening and happening, they start putting two and two together.”
Users even began approaching McCoole’s account with worries the police had infiltrated the site. Once they realised the forum wasn’t returning, and news finally emerged of McCoole’s arrest, some even offered grudging compliments. “One guy posted something along the lines of, ‘Kudos. I chatted to McCoole for six months and didn’t realise it was the cops’,” Griffiths says.
Two Argos officers received awards for so seamlessly assuming McCoole’s identity for six months on the board. Last month, Richard Huckle was sentenced to a minimum 23 years’ jail. Shannon McCoole is serving 35 years.
A blue line has been struck through both their names on the most-wanted list above Griffiths’ desk. More than two dozen others were crossed off the whiteboard by the time that particular investigation was closed. Eight remain.
- This article was amended on 4 August 2016 for legal reasons.
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