Participants who molested children and created new images of child pornography were placed in a “Super VIP” category that gave them access to the entire quantity of child porn on the bulletin board, the court papers stated.Ī “Super Hardcore” section of the bulletin board was limited to posts showing adults having violent sexual intercourse with “very young kids” subjected to physical and sexual abuse.Īll 72 U.S. Participants were required to continually upload images of child sexual abuse to maintain their membership. To conceal their conduct, members used screen names rather than actual names and accessed the bulletin board via proxy servers, with Internet traffic routed through other computers to disguise a user’s location, according to the court papers. indictments were unsealed in Shreveport, La. Another 20 are known to authorities only by their Internet names and remain at large.Īuthorities have arrested people in 13 other countries - Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland, but some of those were arrested on local rather than the U.S. Of the 72 charged in the United States, 43 have been arrested in this country and nine abroad. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who heads Justice’s criminal division, called the criminal enterprise “a living horror.” Napolitano said the amount of child porn swapped by participants in the network was massive, the equivalent to 16,000 DVDs. In many cases, the children being victimized were in obvious, and intentional, pain - even in distress and crying, just as the rules for one area of the bulletin board mandated, the attorney general said.įifteen arrested Dreamboard participants personally created child pornography, according to the Justice Department. Numerous participants in the network sexually abused children ages 12 and under, produced images and video of the abuse and then shared it with other club members, according to court papers released in the case.Īt a news conference Wednesday at the Justice Department, the attorney general called the criminal activity a “nightmare” for the children and said that some of the children featured in the images and videos were just infants.

When a call was placed to the home this morning, a man answered the phone but immediately hung up when the reporter identified himself.Īccording to the indictment, Benet Schmidt posted pictures of prepubescent child pornography to the site.Īttorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the 20-month law enforcement effort called Operation Delego targeted more than 600 Dreamboard members around the world for allegedly participating in the private, members-only Internet club created to promote pedophilia. The phone at the address is listed under the name George O. Investigators say he was a member of the “Dreamboard” online bulletin board.Īccording to officials, the network involved an online bulletin board through which tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused children were traded.

A Cohoes man is one of 72 people accused of taking part in an international child pornography network.īenet Schmidt, 36, was arrested as a result of the investigation by the U.S.

Dreamboard arrests