How Dark Web Platform Used Child Sexual Abuse Content To Mint Money | Operation Kidflix Explained

What Is Kidflix?

Kidflix was launched in 2021 by a “cybercriminal who made a huge profit from it." It quickly became one of the most popular hubs for paedophiles, according to Europol.

The dark web streaming platform provided access to thousands of videos depicting extreme child sexual abuse—including crimes against very young children.

Over the past three years, the site amassed around 1.8 million users worldwide. It hosted approximately 91,000 unique videos, amounting to nearly 6,288 hours of explicit content—all shared on a highly profitable network.

How Did Kidflix Make Money?

According to Europol, Kidflix not only enabled users to download child sexual abuse material but also to stream video files. Users made payments using cryptocurrencies, which were subsequently converted into tokens.

Users could earn tokens by uploading material, verifying titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos, it added.

Before authorities took it down on March 11, 2025, Kidflix was expanding at an alarming rate, with 3.5 new videos being uploaded every hour.

Europol said the operation had been the largest ever handled by its experts in fighting child sexual exploitation and one of the biggest cases the agency had supported in recent years.

It said a total of almost 1,400 suspects had been identified, while 39 children were protected through the operation.

How The Operation Was Busted

Dubbed ‘Operation Stream’, the crackdown against Kidlfix is “one of the biggest blows against child pornography in recent years," Guido Limmer, deputy head of the Bavarian criminal police, told news agency AFP.

The investigation spearheaded by German authorities and joined by forces of 36 countries led to the dismantling of Kidflix.

In March, the police conducted coordinated raids across 31 nations in what Europol’s Guido Limmer described as the “largest operation ever" of its kind.

In one particularly disturbing case, a 36-year-old man was arrested for searching child abuse images on Kidflix and then “offering his young son for games." The man was arrested, while the boy was sent to child protection services.

In another case, investigators tracked down a “serial abuser" operating from the US.

Senior prosecutor Thomas Goger revealed that most of the identified suspects were between 20 and 40 years old, with an average age of 31. The youngest was born in 2006, while the oldest was in their seventies. Many had been active on the darknet for years.

“While many people believe they can hide in these corners of the dark web, the online world is not anonymous," Det. Erik Bjarnason of the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team’s Internet Child Exploitation unit told Global News.

In one raid by German and Dutch authorities, nearly 72,000 videos of child sexual abuse were recovered.

New ProtectEU Strategy Against Cyber Threats

The European Commission unveiled a new internal security strategy called ProtectEU to better detect cyber threats, fight serious and organised crimes, and share intelligence across the region.

As part of the initiative, the Commission is expected to “present a Technology Roadmap on encryption to identify and assess technological solutions to enable lawful access to data by law enforcement authorities in 2026."

The aim is to “identify and assess technological solutions that would enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner, safeguarding cybersecurity and fundamental rights."