Fight against pedophiles

Data sniffer dogs also found buried hard disks

The BK's data sniffer dogs are trained to sniff out certain substances, such as those found in USB sticks.

(Bild: APA/BMI/BK)

The Unit for Sexual Offenses and Online Child Abuse at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BK), together with the state criminal investigation offices, identified 464 suspects last year. Recently, service dogs specialized in finding USB sticks and data carriers with abuse material have been deployed in the fight against paedophiles.

35 victims in Germany and abroad have been traced and rescued, the youngest being a six-month-old baby. The suspects were tracked down on the basis of reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which scours social media for potential abuse material. The special investigators followed up 15,882 leads, whereby countless duplicate and multiple reports had to be filtered out, as department head Dieter Csefan explained.

New tool to make work easier
A new tool, which will be rolled out in September, is intended to make the investigators' work easier: Material that has already been viewed will be categorized, classified and pre-sorted, saving officers multiple viewings and speeding up police work. Acute cases can then be prioritized. "It is still the investigators and not the software that determine whether or not abuse has taken place," it was emphasized.

In addition to new software, this service dog specializing in data carriers also helps the investigators.

(Bild: APA/BMI/BK)

The 464 suspects were divided into those who possessed material depicting child abuse, those who had committed acts of abuse themselves and made images and videos of them, and those who followed acts of abuse against children via livestreaming. The suspects represented a cross-section of the population in terms of age, social setting and income. Women were also among those investigated.

Dogs found buried hard disks
During house searches, service dogs are now also used that are trained to detect special substances found on USB sticks. These data carriers are often disguised as everyday objects - lighters, pens or lipsticks - and run the risk of being overlooked. Two data carrier sniffer dogs from Bavaria, who were called in to assist, managed to locate hard drives buried in a garden during a house search. "We just had to dig them up. Due to the size of the property, it would have been difficult to find the evidence without animal help," says Csefan.

There are now two service dogs at the Upper Austrian State Police Directorate (LPD), which were trained at the central service dog school in Herzogau-Waldmünchen in Bavaria. In future, the animals will be able to sniff out data carriers as well as narcotics and will be deployed throughout Austria if necessary.

Cross-national cooperation
Jürgen Ungerböck, Head of the Special Unit at the Federal Criminal Police Office, emphasized the importance of cross-national cooperation between police authorities, particularly in the case of online child abuse. Last year, Interpol and the Victim Identification Group of the Australian police received information about a Tor user who was distributing relevant images of underage girls on the darknet. After a year of intensive investigations, a BK employee was able to track down the perpetrator and identify three victims, all of whom were family members. The man has since been sentenced to several years in prison.

On 19 May 2023, another man was arrested in a hotel in the US state of Colorado who had tricked a then 14-year-old girl from Vienna into sending him sexualized images in 2020. He was tracked down following tips from the Victim Identification Task Force set up by Europol. The US authorities initially proved that he had put pressure on 74 other young girls via Snapchat and Instagram and persuaded them to send him sexualized images and videos.