Major child porn distributor busted in Colombia thanks to British police

A major global distributor of child pornography known as “Grindhouse 1” was captured on Thursday near the Colombian city of Medellin with hard drives containing more than 84,000 sex videos of young boys and girls, according to Colombia police.

Cops said they tracked down the 27-year-old suspect thanks to emails intercepted by British police during a separate pornography bust last year of a distributor known as “Sobocki.” Officials were able to track the IP address on those emails to Grindhouse’s home, located in a small town in the hills outside Medellin.

The real identity of Grindhouse 1 has not been released. His arrest is one of the largest child pornography busts in recent months.

But it’s not all happening in Colombia. In March Canadian authorities tracked down the location of a massive data center in Ontario that hosted 1.2 petabytes of child porn files. That amount of data is four times larger than the entire digital archives of the Library of Congress. Ontario Police said some 7,500 people in 100 countries were sharing child pornography on that platform.

The U.S. has also nabbed several big time porn distributors recently, including John Shearen, a 51-year-old who was busted two years ago with a drive containing anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million child pornography videos, according to the Florida Deparment of Law Enforcement.

Manuel Rueda is a correspondent for Fusion, covering Mexico and South America. He travels from donkey festivals, to salsa clubs to steamy places with cartel activity.