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Playpen
Playpen was a child pornography website that operated from August 2014 to March 2015. The website operated through the Tor network, which allowed users to use the website anonymously. When it was shut down in March 2015, the site reportedly had over 215,000 users and contained approximately 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including toddlers.[1]
On February 19, 2015, six months after the website became operational, the FBI arrested Steven W. Chase, the site's administrator, following a tip from foreign law enforcement agents who had reported on his activities in December 2014. Investigators determined that the website was hosted on a misconfigured web server that inadvertently revealed its IP address. The FBI traced this IP address to a U.S. web hosting company and leveraged its financial records to identify and apprehend Chase.[1] In May 2017, Chase was sentenced to 30 years in prison.[2]
Controversially, following the arrests, the FBI seized the server hosting the website from a web hosting facility located in Lenoir, North Carolina, and moved it to its own data center in Newington, Virginia. The FBI continued to operate the website for an additional 13 days, from February 20 to March 4, 2015, as part of Operation Pacifier.[3] After transferring ownership, the website's viewership sharply increased by 100,000 users.