[German]As part of an international operation "Stream" coordinated by Europol, law enforcement officers and investigators have succeeded in shutting down Kidflix, a large child pornography streaming platform operating on the darknet.
This is a brief addendum, as I received the original report from Europol late on April 2, 2025. According to Europol, Kidflix was one of the largest paedophile platforms in the world with almost 2 million users. This platform has now been shut down in an international operation against the sexual exploitation of children.
Europol's investigation was supported by the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation and led by the Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime (ZCB). Over 35 countries worldwide were involved in the operation.
Operation Stream was the largest operation ever conducted by Europol's child sexual exploitation experts and one of the largest cases the law enforcement agency has supported in recent years.
Server seized on March 11, 2025
During the investigation, Europol analysts from the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) provided intensive operational support to national authorities by analyzing thousands of videos. Europol experts also reviewed all available data and provided evidence to the countries concerned to facilitate the investigation.
According to Europol, a total of 1.8 million users worldwide logged onto the KidFlix platform between April 2022 and March 2025. On March 11, 2025, the server, which contained around 72,000 videos at the time, was seized by German and Dutch authorities.
The investigation led to the identification of almost 1,400 suspects worldwide. So far, 79 of these people have been arrested for sharing and distributing child sexual abuse material. Some of those arrested not only uploaded and viewed videos, but also abused children.
Long-term investigations and findings of Operation Stream
The investigations of Operation Stream began back in 2022 and led to the "Action Weeks" from March 10 to 23, 2025. So far, the operation has led to the identification of 1,393 suspects and the arrest of 79 suspects.
Over 3,000 electronic devices have been confiscated in raids and, according to Europol, 39 children have been protected from further abuse.
Details about Kidflix
Kidflix war eine Streaming-Plattform, die im Jahr 2021 von einem Cyberkriminellen gegründet wurde. Der Person gelang es, aus der Plattform einen enormen Profit zu ziehen, da Kidflix es schnell zu einer der beliebtesten Plattformen unter Pädophilen wurde.
According to the authorities, 91,000 individual videos were uploaded and shared during the time the platform was active, with a total running time of 6,288 hours. On average, around 3.5 new videos were uploaded to the platform every hour, many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement agencies.
In contrast to other well-known platforms of this kind, Kidflix not only allowed users to download CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material), but also to stream video files. Users paid with cryptocurrencies, which were subsequently converted into tokens.
By uploading CSAM, verifying video titles and descriptions, and assigning categories to the videos, criminals could earn tokens that were then used to view content.
Each video was uploaded in multiple versions – low, medium and high quality – allowing criminals to preview the content and pay a fee to unlock higher quality versions.
