Childs Play (website)

Childs Play was a darknet child abuse website that operated from April 2016 to September 2017, which at its peak was the largest of its class. The site was concealed by being run as a hidden service on the Tor network. After running the site for the first six months, owner Benjamin Faulkner of Guelph, Ontario, Canada was captured by the United States Department of Homeland Security. For the remaining eleven months the website was owned and operated by the Australian Queensland Police Service's Task Force Argos, as part of "Operation Artemis".
Reactions.
The website was run by Australian police for 11 months, and involved impersonation of the forum owner "WarHead" (Faulkner's alias) which required police to regularly post child abuse images, in order to convince users that the site was not compromised. Ivar Stokkereit, a legal adviser to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Norway, stated this was "a clear violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, even though the police’s intention is to prevent new offenses in the long run". Amnesty International also criticized the actions as "unacceptable under human rights law". ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) supported the proactive approach taken by Task Force Argos.
James Sheptycki, professor in criminology at York University, criticized the transfer of the website from its original server in Europe to Australia as "jurisdiction shopping", being done due to the favourable legal framework in Australia that would allow the website to continue running in this way.
Convictions.
The capture of the site, and its subsequent use to gather information, has led to arrests and convictions:
Media portrayals.
In November 2019 the Canadian network CBC in collaboration with Norwegian VG (Verdens Gang) published a six-part podcast called "Hunting Warhead", chronicling the investigation by VG journalist Håkon Høydal and a Norwegian computer security expert of child sexual abuse networks on the dark web. In the course of the six episodes, CBC journalist Daemon Fairless examines the background of Benjamin Faulkner and the course of events that led to his capture.