Internet paedophile investigation got it wrong

According to a Guardian investigation, the high profile Operation Ore may have falsely identified thousands of people as paedophiles when they were actually victims of credit card fraud.

More than 7,272 British residents were targeted by Operation Ore and 39 men have killed themselves under the pressure of the investigations. Names like Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist, and Robert del Naja of Massive Attack, were both falsely accused of accessing child pornography, the article said.

Thousands of cases under Operation Ore were built on the use of credit card details to sign up for pornography websites.

Often the card details were stolen, but the sites contained nothing or legal material only and the people who allegedly signed up to visit the sites never went there.

It all started when a Texan porn portal called Landslide.com was investigated by the US Postal Inspection Service. Landslide allowed people to sign up with their credit cards to access affiliated porn sites. Some of the sites appeared to deal with kiddie porn.

The lists of those signed up to Landslide were handed over to Inspector Knacker of the Yard who didn't know that the list included those who visited legal porn sites.

It also didn't take into account the huge amount of credit card fraud against Landslide and unwitting Britons by website owners acquiring or trading in stolen credit card details.

Freelance hack Duncan Campbell examined the hard drives from Landslide and found that a huge percentage of the credit card details were fraudulent and the police didn't even look for it.

One Operation Ore copper told a person they thought was a kiddie porn dealer that they had never heard of Internet credit card fraud. After the case was chucked out they later said sorry.

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