Invisible predators: the shifting behaviour of paedophiles has Australian police playing catch-up

‘Offenders know that law enforcement are crawling offender forums across the dark web and they’re responding accordingly,’ Michael Salter says. Photograph: John Williams/Alamy

In the Brisbane office of the taskforce Argos, scrawled on a whiteboard was a “most-wanted” list containing the online identities of dozens of global members of a dark web paedophile forum.

The man now accused of being the country’s worst-known serial child sexual abuse offender was not on that list.