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Playpen
Playpen was a child pornography website that operated from August 2014 to March 2015. Accessible via the Tor network, it provided users with a degree of anonymity while engaging with its content. At the time of its shutdown in March 2015, the website reportedly boasted over 215,000 users and harbored approximately 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including toddlers.[1]
On February 19, 2015, just six months into its operation, the FBI arrested Steven W. Chase, the site's administrator. This action followed a tip from foreign law enforcement agents who had reported on his activities back in December 2014. Investigators discovered that the website was hosted on a misconfigured web server, which inadvertently revealed its IP address. The FBI tracked this IP address to a U.S. web hosting company and used its financial records to identify and apprehend Chase.[1] In May 2017, Chase was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in operating the website.[2]
Alongside Chase, two co-defendants, Michael Fluckiger and David Browning, were also sentenced to 20 years in prison for their contributions to the operation of the website.[2]
In a controversial move, following the arrests, the FBI seized the server hosting Playpen from a web hosting facility in Lenoir, North Carolina, and relocated 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] During this period, the website's viewership surged by an additional 100,000 users.