The SaferNet report was delivered this Wednesday (23) to the Federal Public Ministry in São Paulo. NGO receives reports of child pornography and sexual exploitation on platforms.

A report prepared by SaferNet, a non-governmental organization that has worked to promote human rights on the internet since 2005, revealed that 1.25 million users of the Telegram messaging application participate in groups or channels that sell and share images of child sexual abuse and pornographic material. In one of these communities alone – which was still active – the presence of 200,000 users was observed.

Entitled “How Telegram has been used in Brazil as a space for virtual commerce by sexual criminals”, the report was delivered this Wednesday (23) to the Regional Prosecutor’s Office for Citizen’s Rights of the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) in São Paulo , the Federal Police and also French authorities, who are investigating various crimes on Telegram. One of these investigations recently led to the company’s president and founder, Pavel Durov, being arrested in France. He is free, but cannot leave the country.

The report that was delivered to the authorities today was produced through a search of 874 Telegram links that had been reported to Safernet by internet users for containing images of child sexual abuse and exploitation. SaferNet analyzed all these links and discovered that 149 of them were still active, without having been subject to any restrictions by the platform. In addition, SaferNet identified a further 66 links that had never been reported before and which also contained criminal content.

“We carried out a detailed survey of the links of Telegram groups that were reported in Brazil, through the address www.denuncie.org.br, which is SaferNet Brasil’s reporting channel, in the period from January 1st to June 30th of this year . Of these 874 links, 141 were still active in the months in which the verification was carried out, which was from July to September. Of these active links, we found 41 groups in which images of child sexual abuse were not only distributed, but also bought and sold. It was a street market, a trade in images of child sexual abuse, with real images, some self-generated images and other images produced by artificial intelligence”, explained Thiago Tavares, president of SaferNet Brasil.

In Brazil, the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA) defines the sale or exhibition of photos and videos of explicit sexual scenes involving children and adolescents as a crime. It is also a crime to disseminate these images by any means and to possess files of this type. For Safernet, anyone who consumes images of child sexual violence is also an accomplice to child sexual abuse and exploitation.

According to Tavares, the users and administrators of these Telegram groups committed several crimes, including sharing and selling images of child sexual abuse and exploitation, nude and sexual images leaked without consent and selling material porn generated with artificial intelligence. “It’s a real free market for digital crime in Brazil”, defined the president of the NGO.

“There are several crimes that are involved. The Federal Public Ministry has already received all this documentation that contains all the evidence that was collected, including the addresses of the groups that are still active. It’s a real free market for digital crime in Brazil. We also collect and identify words and codes that are used by criminals to index child sexual exploitation abuse content, and also to report illegal content related to child sexual abuse in different languages,” he said, in an interview today (23) with the Agency Brazil.

In addition to these crimes, SaferNet discovered that some of the content is published by bots or sold using cryptocurrencies as payment, which makes identifying criminals even more difficult. “We identified the existence of bots, that is, robots, dedicated to creating new images for a fee. You upload, for example, a photo of someone and upon payment, this robot returns a nude, or even pornographic, image. This is done via payment via PIX or using fintechs or payment processors spread across 23 countries. Of these 23 payment processors partnered with Telegram, there are at least five internationally sanctioned companies that are processing payments in Brazil,” said Tavares.

These mechanisms that are used for the financial processing of operations on Telegram, warns Tavares, demonstrate “a flagrant violation of Central Bank regulations” and may also be used for money laundering and terrorist financing around the world.

“In the report we also ask the Public Ministry to not only officiate the Central Bank, but also the National Strategy to Combat Money Laundering, whose secretariat is in the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, to carry out studies with the aim of identifying and propose recommendations to fill existing gaps in the regulation of the sector in Brazil to prevent the financial system from processing this type of payment intended to finance networks of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents”.

Telegram is the messaging application that leads the number of reports received by SaferNet. Since 2021, it is also one of the ten domains that have the most links associated with child pornography and that have been reported to the NGO. For years, Telegram has been the target of complaints for not removing Brazilian communities and users who commit crimes such as racial discrimination, attacks on democracy, support for Nazism or the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.

“Telegram is a shadowy company that operates on a global scale. There are 900 million users worldwide and, according to its founder and president, this operation is run by 35 engineers. In other words, it is a purposefully and deliberately very small team,” said Tavares. “It is a company that has corporate behavior that is incompatible with Brazilian legislation, with the Federal Constitution, with what determines the Child and Adolescent Statute and with what determines the basic rules of compliance and conformity for the operation and development of economic activities in any country”.

Agência Brasil contacted Telegram to comment on this report, but until the publication of this report it had not received a response from the company.

It is possible to report pages that contain images of abuse and sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. This can be done at the Safernet Brasil National Reporting Center (https://new.safernet.org.br/denuncie). In case of suspected sexual violence against children or adolescents, Dial 100 must be called.

The Telegram platform also allows users to report criminal content, channels, groups or messages. This can be done via email [email protected]with the subject “Report user @name”. ‘You must include details of the reason for the complaint and wait for a response from the company.