The National Police has arrested a man in Bilbao as an alleged perpetrator of a crime of corruption of minors, by possessing and sharing child pornography through the Internet.
The investigations, carried out by researchers from the Bilbao Organized Crime Group, in collaboration with the Central Cybercrime Unit of Madrid, revealed that videos of a paedophile nature were being downloaded and shared from a Bilbao home. In this sense, the analysis of the information provided by the internet service provider, allowed to geolocate the house and identify the owner of the service.
After a series of surveillance and surveillance, the agents managed to confirm the identity of the user of the IP address from which the downloads were made, so, on October 11 and with judicial authorization, they entered and searched the suspect’s home, located in the Biscayan capital.
During this diligence, the investigators proceeded with the arrest of the suspect, a 58-year-old man, and the intervention of a hard drive, a tablet, and various peripheral external storage devices (USB sticks, SD card, and micro SD).
In a first "in situ" analysis of the pornographic material contained in these electronic devices, they located numerous videos and photographs of Japanese pornographic cartoons of minors, a Japanese fictional genre known as "paedophile Hentai", which in itself is considered a crime of corruption of minors since, according to the Criminal Code, the mere visual representation of a person who appears underage in a sexual context is considered child pornography. In addition, the researchers discovered that the detainee also altered these cartoons by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace the faces with those of real minors.
For all these reasons, the detainee was placed at the disposal of the courts while the investigators continue to analyse the large amount of material involved.