Investigating the Availability of Child Sexual Abuse Materials in Dark Web Markets: Evidence Gathered and Lessons Learned

Child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) and the associated distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) are serious offences online and offline. They are exacerbated by the increased popularity of dark web markets, in which vendors and buyers can exchange CSAM while hiding their identities. The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the CSEA landscape in dark web markets. We reviewed and collated four groups of keywords (a total of 198) for the detection/discovery of potential CSAM on the dark web market. This allowed us to conduct a systematic data collection (i.e., scraping) on dark web markets containing CSAM to create a new text-based dataset and perform further analysis. We found that CSAM is more public in the Chinese market, but not in the mainstream English market. To illustrate this point, we detected 724 CSAM items in the two Chinese dark web markets studied, but none in the eight English markets. While the prices of these CSAM remain low, we found that there were 3,449 sales over the 44-week observation period, implying that CSAM has been commercialised to some extent. We also noticed that mainstream cloud-based data storage services were used for the distribution and sharing of CSAM. We hope that the findings presented in this paper can help relevant stakeholders to understand the CSAM landscape in the dark web market better, which in turn may be used to devise more effective countermeasures to combat CSEA and CSAM.