World Of Secrets - The Darkest Web: 4. Undercover

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

After they rescue Lucy, Greg and Pete discover the dark web community is even bigger than they thought. There are hundreds of websites each sharing different images of different kinds of child sexual abuse. Overwhelmed by what they have found online and the sheer scale of the problem, Greg makes a decision to go undercover. He will go online on the dark web and talk to the paedophiles directly. They have to do everything they can to try to stop the abusers. This podcast includes some upsetting scenes and discussions of child sexual abuse. For further information on the issues raised in the programme, contact support organisations in your own country. For a list of organisations in the UK that can provide support go to bbc.co.uk/actionline.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. All this week on the Global Story podcast, we're looking at the Iran War and the shockwaves now reshaping the Middle East. With the BBC's expert reporters from Israel to the Gulf states to the streets of Tehran itself, we'll ask how this conflict is radically redrawing the region's balance of power. We'll examine the case the Trump administration is making for war and ask whether this marks a new era of American Interimps. prevention. What comes next for the people of Iran, for the Trump presidency, and for the entire Middle East? The U.S. Israel War in Iran all week on the global story. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Sam. Just a warning before we start, this episode contains

references to child and infant sexual abuse. Most of us spend a bit too much time on the internet. But even though you've visited thousands of websites, there are places online you'll probably never see. Places that you wouldn't want to see. But places that special agents Greg Squire and Pete Manning need to see to do their work. Encrypted spaces protected by some of the most sophisticated criminals on the planet. Where the only people welcome are those committing or encouraging child sexual

abuse. We came up with so many crazy ideas and tried most of them. We pushed the boundaries of what we ever thought was possible, like just, especially when it came to these closed rooms trying to get, can you imagine trying to infiltrate like a gang or a mob where, you know, the only way you were admitted entrance is if you were to sexually abuse a child, how do you do that. How do you get in there? And that was our challenge. It's like how do you infiltrate a group with such an exclusive, you know, membership criteria? In case you're wondering if there's a certain type of person that Greg could pretend to be or emulate in order to gain access, then think again. There's no such thing as a typical user. As many times as we like to think that we've put together

a piece of a profile for somebody that we're looking at, whether it's a producer, somebody who actually creates the material or a collector, someone who just takes in but doesn't actually abuse children themselves, give it days or weeks, and we break that profile in pieces again. This type of crime really spans international borders, it spans religions, it's races, there's no way to pin down a specific type of person that does this. It really is pretty broad. And because there's no obvious demographic, there is no shortcut to this work. There are no obvious places to look for child abusers on the dark web.

And no simple disguise for an undercover officer to use. Some of the people that we've investigated and arrested in the past decade have spanned from, you know, early 20-something, tech-savvy, gainfully employed individuals that you'd see them as productive members of society from the outside. On the other hand, you can find the recluse in their house. The, you know, the person is living in a basement on their computer all day, all night, 50 years old.

So you could have people that are in high-paying, professional jobs to people that are unemployed. It could be anyone, anywhere. And so Greg's only option is to go undercover on the dark web and spend a lot of time there. He needs to watch and wait for the abusers to give themselves away. This is World of Secrets. Season 11.

The Darkest Web. A BBC World Service investigation. I'm Sam Piranti, a documentary maker. Episode 4, Undercover. I think in the beginning, I wasn't thinking quite as long term as it ended up being. And having done like really minimal interactions with other cases online, I didn't have a vast amount of a chatting experience, you know, on one-on-one or anything like that. It's 2015. Greg's life has taken a turn.

He's no longer announcing his presence to criminals. Instead, he's trying to convince them he's one of them. But in order to be accepted on the dark web, Greg needs to create an identity. He needs to become someone who will be useful to the people he's trying to catch. So in trying to build this new person, you know, that I thought I needed to be or would become. I was trying to factor in a balance between effectiveness

and what role I could be kind of in this community. And so to be part of that, not only would you have to be savvy enough to understand these longtime series and these abuse videos and be able to describe them and comment on them. But you also had to learn this collection of characters, like each one having a role,

each one expecting you to respect that role, respect that person. But that's not all. They also have very specific skills and interests. A large majority of the people that we ended up arresting had some sort of technical expertise, background. in their professional or personal lives, they were involved in some sort of use or development of technology.

So they had the mindset to be able to develop these processes or set up hidden services and find ways to pay for things. But some of them didn't. Like, it's amazing at if you have an obsession for something, how you can find the energy to learn very technical processes and things that normal people can't do when you have an obsession for abusing children. They had the news covered. They had technology covered. They had communication covered. They had recruitment covered. Organized right down to boys versus girls, hardcore versus Softcore, guides and tutorials, everything from, you know, what barriers are you facing to come

join us, down to, oh, if you're going to have a Mac machine, you want to do this. If you have a Windows machine, you want to do this. So it was pretty amazing that their investment, not just in time, but in skill set. In case you're wondering why child abusers need to have the news covered, this is why. If there was public news available worldwide about, say, an arrest, that person who ran that section on the site would pull the articles. They would pull down conversations that occurred about it to pretty much inform the community, you know, what's happening today.

And the whole idea was safety of the community. So that, you know, had someone been arrested and then all of a sudden their screen name comes back online, that's probably a police officer or there's something wrong with that or maybe their intent isn't good anymore. So it's all about protection of the society and growth of the society. But it isn't just the organization

of this criminal community. The experts in tech, communications and news, which Greg and the team have to wrap their heads around. It's the sheer amount of time these users spend online. the almost constant stream of new images of children they're uploading. This was life for them.

They were putting 40, 50, 60 hours a weekend to this community. And for a lot of them, it seemed like this was their primary thing. Like this was their escape. You know, this is where they wanted to be. You could see how much was happening. So much that if Greg leaves the forum, for even a few hours, he could miss potential clues. Leeds which could help shut down abusers.

Leeds, which he might never be able to access again. You would go to sleep at 9pm and in the neck by the next morning. There would be hundreds of new messages, new postings, new images of children. and it was kind of shocking that in the time that you're asleep, things can almost double. Greg is trying to maintain a normal life, but it's becoming increasingly difficult. That time frame, it was a majority of my identity,

and I think, you know, probably some error in that. When I was home and with my kids, I tried to be dead, you know, full time dead. But that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking in the background or looking at my phone and trying to manage both worlds essentially. Inevitably, you find yourself looking at your own life and your own surroundings and wondering if there's something you hadn't thought of yet at work. So the world's really become very blended. You just, I mean, for me, like I was just thinking about the job almost full time.

But the problem isn't just the number of posts. New users. People choosing to seek out this material are always joining. In 2014, there were around 20,000 of them. Within just one year, nine times as many were on the sites. And new websites are popping up all the time. With the growth of these forums and the number of people involved, they began to really categorize and sort of divide what their interests were.

So the first division would be boys and girls. And then from there, they just kept creating subdivisions of that to say, oh, I only want to see six to 12 year olds. And that works for a certain group. And the other guys were like, well, I want to see babies to six-year-olds. and then I only want to see babies. And then I want to see videos only, photographs only. I want to see spy cameras only. I want to see vintage films.

I want to see literature about children. So, you know, it wasn't weird to see 20 different subsections on these sites. So the divisions of these categories and subcategories, you know, certainly drew attention. Although it feels difficult to keep up, that's exactly what they need to do, because more and more children are in danger. Especially when it came down to people saying, oh, I have access to a child. It's nighttime in Boston, and as usual, Pete and Greg are working late.

They're in their office in the centre of town, finishing off a sandwich and an ice cream cake for dinner, while scouring the dark web. Around them, the lights in the office have faded. Their faces illuminated by only their computer screens. They are focused on the forums. Because the people they're trying to catch are onto them. They know they're being watched.

The child sex abuser community adjusts to the techniques used by law enforcement. After details were released about the arrest of Lucy's abuser, The community regrouped. They just realized the techniques we were using to try to identify the offenders and the victims. And so they started discussing tactics and countermeasures to our tactics. And so they started really ramping up their security measures, sanitizing images, sanitizing metadata, exif data, covering footprints. Pete sees chatter about the need to be even more diligent in removing

any digital traces online that might identify them in the real world. And the hierarchy within the groups starts to become more pronounced. Producers would get special treatment and they would make special sections of the forums or membership levels that protected them from just your normal pass or buys. Most of these sites you didn't need to be a producer to be able to go into, but then they started making sections of those forums or chat rooms that, were producer only or whole forums themselves that were only accessible to other producers. And you had to prove that to the community that you had access by taking very specific pictures

or images, videos and proving that you were that person. When Pete says producer, he means people who are actively abusing children and then uploading the images of this to the dark web. These people see themselves as the elite. Able to provide what everyone in the community wants. They are some of the most dangerous people on the dark web, doing everything they can to avoid being caught. But mistakes do happen.

And when they do, Greg and Pete are ready to pounce. All this week on the Global Story podcast, we're looking at the Iran War and the shockwaves now reshaping the Middle East. With the BBC's expert reporters from Israel to the Gulf states to the streets of Tehran itself, we'll ask how this conflict is radically redrawing the region's balance of power. We'll examine the case the Trump administration is making for war and ask whether this marks a new era of American intervention.

What comes next for the people of Iran, for the Trump presidency, and for the entire Middle East? The U.S.-Israel war in Iran all week on the global story. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Twinkle came to our attention when a dark website opened up called Baby Heart. The name is exactly what they were focused on. On that late night in the Boston office, Greg notices someone online. It's a new user calling himself Twinkle.

But that's not his real name. Greg is online a lot, using an undercover identity he's lurking in the background on websites and interacting with different users. Like all forums, child abuse forums on the dark web, are a community. Like all communities, people like to feel welcome and understood. And Greg, as you've probably worked out, is a very welcoming guy. A lot of undercover work, which Greg took the lion's share of. He is very good at getting people to trust

and without having to break rules, morals, ethics, laws, being able to be accepted by such a group is a pretty heavy task. A pretty heavy task is a typical Pete understatement. But if Greg has to use his natural warmth to build a rapport with child abusers in order to catch them, well, that's what he's going to do. They have just seen. someone new with a handle twinkle, a user running a website dedicated to the sexual

exploitation of babies and an abuser himself. Despite everything Pete and Greg have seen, this really shocks them. That was the first time we saw a infant dedicated dark website. It wasn't like we hadn't seen the abuse before, but we just hadn't seen the scale before. So Twinkle was the self-professed operator of the site, owner operator of the site, and naturally he became a person of great interest to all of us. This us is a small number of police officers in different parts of the world who are doing the same job as Greg and Pete. Other agents who are also entirely dedicated to catching child abusers on the dark weather. Our team really began to focus and become dedicated to dark web activity.

It really, you know, firmed up our place, I think, in the global community as far as a group that would be, you know, reliable, effective, obviously hardworking. These disparate law enforcement officers set up what they call the global working group. It's not a very descriptive name for what the group actually does, sharing intelligence in order to track down people, who are committed to staying hidden from view. In other areas of intelligent sharing, some countries refuse to work with each other, perhaps wary of revealing their capability. But when it comes to child abuse, none of that matters.

We were having real collaboration amongst multiple countries and working on that really a 24-hour clock that was the dark web environment, getting together and having 24-hour coverage, you know, to make sure if something happened while the Europeans were asleep, then, you know, the Australians were able to give them that information, or while the Aussies were asleep, we're able to give them that information. And so when Greg comes across Twinkle, he immediately reaches out to this global community of agents, because Twinkle appears to have an international connection.

A key aspect that we had of Twinkle was his ability to speak Portuguese. It's a standout from many of the other admins. There were sections of Baby Heart that were Portuguese only, and he would post in Portuguese. And because we had tight connections with both Portugal and Brazil, we were able to determine that it was most likely Portuguese from Portugal and not Brazilian Portuguese. But Twinkle's Portuguese isn't the only thing that makes him stand out. Most admins don't claim to be producers themselves,

mostly because it generates a lot of attention, the bad kind of attention that they eventually get caught. Running a site as an admin gains enough attention already, and if you add a level of... you know, having direct access to children that gets the even more scrutiny from law enforcement. It also opens up the door to all types of vulnerabilities because you're posting images of these private places that you are abusing children, and you have to sanitize those images or crop those images or frame them in a way that no one can make an identification. And that's, it gets tougher and tougher with the sheer volume that you post.

Posting is exactly what Twinkle was doing when he inadvertently showed his hand. Literally. I mean, it was unique in that kind of had this skin color gradient to it. It's very subtle. You wouldn't notice it if you weren't really kind of looking, but the parts of the fingers were very white or the rest of the hand was darker. When Pete and Greg get in touch with their colleagues in Brazil and Portugal, their Brazilian counterparts tell them something else. The Brazilians had recently carried out a major arrest of a producer of child sexual abuse material

who went by the name of Sassie, a deeply paranoid character. So paranoid that he collected the details of many of the other producers. Sassy. had a black book filled with the real-life details of many of the producers he had been interacting with on the dark web. And when the Brazilians arrested Sassy, they got a copy of this black book. So when Pete gets in touch to ask about Twinkle, they happily share the black book with their US colleagues. We got this information, this profile of the individual listed in this, black book, you know, we had an actual name of somebody. We didn't know if there's a real name or not,

but we knew it was a name of somebody who was in Portugal. Searching through those posts and those profiles came across some similar profiles with similar pictures, with edits that were very characteristic of edits that you'd find on Baby Heart. To try and protect himself from law enforcement, Twinkle would always use emojis to cover the faces of the children he was abusing before sharing the material on baby heart. It is distinctive. And this is where Pete spots something. The user in the black book, his real-life name they now have, uses emojis in a similar way. But there's something else.

Pete had noticed before that Twinkle had very slightly different coloured skin on his hands. Part of them were very white, while the other parts were a lot darker. We're able to identify that the individual profile had that same skin condition. A skin condition known as Vitiligo, which both Twinkle and the Portuguese man whose real name they now have, both share. Bingo. In Texas, Elisa's older brother Staten is finally beginning to find his place in the world.

He's got a job, or various jobs. Elisa is trying to maintain distance from her family, but it's not always easy. I mean, our contact was limited. I maybe saw him three or four times a year, if even that sometimes. So there wasn't a whole lot there. I think I started to fill more pressure for those relationships

and those connections because of my mom and because she was kind of more of a part of my life at that point. But, I mean, I know that there are probably red flags. If I thought somebody would have seen it, it would be my mom. She lived with him. However, Elisa's mom is no longer the main person in her brother's life. I think he was struggling. with personal relationships to find someone.

I want to say that they maybe met on an app, but I'm not totally positive. Whenever he met his later on wife, everybody was like, well, it's about time. But something still doesn't feel right to Elisa. Why this relationship? And why now? He wasn't having normal relationships

so other people couldn't really figure out. Why? But then it's also like, I know plenty of people who are still single. Elisa's brother Staten and his girlfriend don't waste any time. They get engaged. So at that point, he was kind of following, like, typical timeline. When you find someone, they started getting more serious. They ended up getting married.

Then, Elisa gets the news she's been dreading. her brother's wife is pregnant and it makes Elisa feel sick that's next time on World of Secrets we would like as many people as possible to hear this story so please leave a rating and a review

and do tell others about World of Secrets it really does help all this week on the Global Story podcast we're looking at the Iran War and the shockwaves now reshaping the Middle East with the BBC's expert reporters from Israel to the Gulf states to the streets of Tehran itself. We'll ask how this conflict is radically redrawing the region's balance of power. We'll examine the case the Trump administration

is making for war and ask whether this marks a new era of American intervention. What comes next for the people of Iran, for the Trump presidency, and for the entire Middle East? The U.S.-Israel war in Iran all week on the global story. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.