Online image board of Australian women ripped down as Dutch police target revenge porn site
Updated
Intimate images of women and girls from across Australia that have been shared without their consent have been taken offline after Dutch police targeted a major revenge porn site.
Police in The Netherlands said several men had been arrested in connection with the site Anon-IB, which hosted images of thousands of women across the world that were posted without their consent.
The seizure of the website by authorities late last week followed a year-long investigation.
The website then hosted a message from Dutch police that cyber crime teams had "seized the Anon-IB forum in an ongoing investigation concerning criminal offences".
Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said Anon-IB hosted an infamous image board called AussieSluts, which was dedicated to posting images of Australian women without their consent.
"This is fantastic," she said.
"Anon-IB is a huge image board that hosted revenge porn, or image-based abuse, it was categorised according to country.
"AussieSluts was one of the more popular ones, that was used by young Australian boys that were trading young girls' images like they were footy cards."
Within the forum, users were free to post requests for images of women based on their location, and would trade images, calling them "wins".
Ms Inman Grant said in many instances Anon-IB had hosted child pornography.
"Often they were school-aged girls, in their uniforms, in front of their schools or with other personally identifiable information, so that amounted to doxing.
"When the images are of a person under the age of 18, it becomes child sexual abuse material.
"I can say we have had dealings with the website administrator and have had success in having individual images taken down."
Ms Inman Grant said "100 per cent" of sites featuring image-based abuse of Australian women were hosted overseas, which often made it difficult to have the sites taken down.
But authorities often struggled to keep up with sites reappearing in new domains.
"It's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole … you can take a site down in one country and it can pop up somewhere else, and with the use of VPNs and other technologies this can be challenging," she said.
"But I don't think it should stop our resolve to go after these sites that are harming our citizens, specifically our young girls."
The Australian Federal Police have been contacted for comment.
Topics: social-media, internet-culture, information-and-communication, pornography, community-and-society, sexual-offences, law-crime-and-justice, canberra-2600, act, australia, netherlands
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