A month-long secret cyber-surveillance operation by the Kerala Police’s countering child sexual exploitation team resulted in scores of persons, including migrant workers and white-collar professionals, getting booked for allegedly trading, peddling, storing and distributing child sexual abuse material.
Officials said suspects rarely stored the images and videos and deleted them immediately after viewing the content. Some regularly formatted their phones to scrub off incriminating evidence.
The operation code-named P-Hunt_23.2 focussed on those who obsessively downloaded, viewed and traded child sex abuse material (CSAM) on closed online messaging groups.