Investigations being carried out by a German child pornography unit, dubbed “Operation Mikado”, have uncovered a child pornography Internet ring with different parts of its operations being hosted in Malta, Liberia and Russia.

Working with credit card companies, investigators from the Saxony-Anhalt region’s Zentralstelle gegen Kinderpornografie (Central Office for Combating Child Pornography) have found over 300 people suspected of having purchased child pornography over the Internet from a particular website in the Philippines.

The German investigators report that the operation comprised the accounting of payments in Malta, computers in Russia, a server in Liberia and a website hosted in the Philippines. Such underground cyber activities are usually carried out by using shell companies and are routed through several countries in order to disguise the operator’s location.

While one specific company operating in Malta is known to clear payments for pornographic websites, it has said it only does so under strict guidelines and that it does not accept business from merchants of illegal pornography, such as that in which children are involved.

But despite having tracked the operation to Malta, Russia and Liberia, the audit trail went cold in the cyberspace of the Philippines and the operators of the website peddling child pornography are still to be apprehended.

So far, the German authorities have arrested 322 people across the country suspected of purchasing child pornography from the website after analysing over 22 million credit card transactions.

In addition to the more traditional scouring of Internet protocol (IP) addresses, German investigators have been working with credit card companies to search their databases for specific transactions.

The suspects are accused of paying $79.99 for 20 days of access to a child pornography website located in the Philippines, Saxony-Anhalt state Interior Minister Holger Hoevelmann said this week.

Operation Mikado is the biggest of its kind in Europe and it has enlisted the voluntary assistance of 14 credit card companies. German data protection regulations do not allow the police to run broad database searches, so investigators gave the credit card companies three specific criteria with which to run their searches: a specific sum of money, a specific timeframe and a specific receiver account.

During hundreds of raids carried out across Germany, photographs, videotapes and computers were confiscated as evidence – among them image files of sexually abused children from Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Most of the suspects apprehended in the raids are said to be pleading guilty.

The investigation, as the German authorities intensify their efforts in tracking suspected child pornography users in the country, has increased the monitoring of auction sites, exchange portals and chat rooms.