Slime Under Overturned Stones

"Our project began with one child victim in York Region and through investigation has grown into a significant international project with thousands of potential victims."
"The investigation is ongoing and continues to grow with every stone that is overturned."
"The young person advised investigators that they had been chatting, sending and receiving child pornography with unknown people throughout the world via popular social networking websites and private chat rooms."
"Investigators learned that the young person had been a victim of child exploitation and had been coerced into providing self-exploited images to unknown people online."
"The abusers appear to be people the victims trusted or online predators that coerced the victim into creating child sexual abuse materials."
Inspector Tim Kelly, York Region Police

York Regional Police Insp. Tim Kelly, left, and OPP Det. Staff Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt briefed the media on Project Hydra on Wednesday. (Charlsie Agro/CBC)

Project Hydra, an international, wide-ranging pornography investigation, has resulted in the arrest of 41 suspects, some as young as twelve, located in 17 different countries. Over one hundred criminal charges have been laid. Nineteen male and female victims were identified at this point, and they run the gamut from infants to teenagers. The charges that have been laid range from accessing, possession and distribution of child pornography.

Canada alone rendered up seventeen suspects for arrest in the large-scale investigation. It began in April of 2014 when the National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre based in Ottawa, informed York Regional Police of images of child pornography uploaded from a York Region residence, located north of Toronto.

Investigators discovered that a young person had uploaded the images. And that initial discovery opened up to the revelation of a much larger operation. Police identified suspects around the world busy exchanging child pornography, using cloud storage. Over 350 investigative packages complete with screenshots of online chats, child sexual abuse images and suspect locations were distributed to police agencies of 17 countries.

Through police accounts it was revealed that most of the suspects arrested through the medium of Project Hydra -- where police forces took action in their own international jurisdictions -- were found in Canada, in the United States and in the United Kingdom. One 24-year-old male from Moncton was found to have exploited over two thousand victims around the world.