Man Who Allegedly Ran Child Porn Site in U.S. Custody

A Ukrainian man who authorities said ran an online child pornography site featuring horrific images and video is in U.S. custody after losing a three-year extradition battle, the U.S. Attorney’s office said at a press conference on Monday in Newark.

Maksym Shynkarenko, 33, was brought to America this weekend from Thailand, where he had been in custody since 2009 after being arrested while on vacation. A 32-count indictment states Shynkarenko founded a Ukraine-based site with thousands of customers across the world, including nearly 600 American men, 30 of whom are from New Jersey.

Shynkarenko was expected to appear in Newark federal court Monday.

“He may be the most significant distributor of child pornography ever prosecuted in the United States, and the investigation which led to this achievement has been the most successful national child pornography investigation to date,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said at a press conference this afternoon.

In New Jersey, dozens of men have been arrested for subscribing to the site.

One of those is Morristown resident Domingo Santos, who received a 51-month sentence. Others arrested who live in the state include Robert Rigney of Lakewood, Layne Bracht of Matewan, Jonathan Burke of Keyport, Stephen Lasher of Verona, George Payne of Hoboken, Terrance McCord of Brick and Charles Morgan of Willingboro.

Shynkarenko’s U.S. arrest marks the latest step in an investigation that began in October 2005, when law enforcement discovered emails from a Long Branch man who had been the target of a separate child pornography investigation. Authorities declined to release additional information about the man today.

The emails led investigators to a website titled “Illegal.CP.,” where viewers were invited to join what was described as “the best child porn site on the net!” An agent from the Newark office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), posing as a subscriber, soon afterwards bought a 20-day subscription for $79.99. The site advised users that they could possibly avoid prosecution by using credit cards, because “it is very difficult to establish you were the person to pay.”

The site, which featured video as well as images, went by a variety of names, including “Dirty Nymphets,” “Sick Child Room” and “Pedo Heaven.”

The ring allegedly used other layers of subterfuge to insulate itself. Subscribers were billed by a company called “AdSoft,” which posed as a legitimate business, and also employed remote servers in Ukraine and the United States.

To crack the ring and to find the subscribers, authorities tapped Shynkarenko’s email and investigated credit card processors.

The early phases of the  investigation focused on clients and have led to the arrest to date of 567 people, all men, in 47 states, including at least 20 who were also abusing children themselves. Between 10 and 50 Americans attempted to join the site daily, Fishman said. Those offenders came from all walks of life.

“They include members of law enforcement, doctors, teachers, clergy and other figures of public trust,” said Andrew McLees, special agent in charge of ICE-Homeland Security Investigations.

They include a San Diego man who eventually admitted to abusing children for 30 years and who traveled to the Philippines to have sex with children. William Irey, a former executive with an Orlando, Fla., construction firm, allegedly preyed on economically disadvantaged girls in Cambodia, torturing them in what authorities described as “some of the most graphic and disturbing child pornography ever to turn up on the Internet.” 

Another offender, Bryan Dickson of Texas, has been convicted of taking pornographic images of a 1-year-old child he had volunteered to babysit.

Fishman today took great pains to describe the ghastly nature of the crimes captured on the website, where the suffering of children allegedly yielded a profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for Shynkarenko and his co-conspirators.

“When we use the term child pornography... we tend to minimalize or trivialize what it is because it makes it easier for us to think about it. It is not simply naked pictures or lewd pictures of unsuspecting children, although that would be bad enough,” Fishman said. “What we’re talking about are pictures, images and video, of the brutal sexual assault and torture by adults of young children.”

If convicted, Shynkarenko faces up to life in prison.

Authorities are urging anyone with information about Internet child pornography rings to call 1-866-DHS-2ICE.