Exclusive: What Happened When The FBI Took Over The Instagram And Kik Of A Child Porn Dealer

The FBI has adopted a new tactic in the war on child pornography: taking over suspects’ online identities to infiltrate private groups sharing disturbing illegal content. A search warrant obtained by Forbes documents the unprecedented operation in which a now-convicted pedophile’s Instagram and Kik accounts were commandeered by the feds. It raises new questions about how federal agents tackle online investigations into child abuse but also how major social networks are being exploited by predators.

The cops’ gateway into this shadowy online world was 23-year-old Daxton Hansen from the Salt Lake City suburb of Roy, Utah. When investigators searched Hansen's home and interviewed him, he was startlingly honest, admitting to viewing a cornucopia of child pornography under the username KitB10. Hansen, who was later sentenced to 48 months in prison after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography, created and was administrator for multiple private groups, all trading nude images and videos of “prepubescent boys engaged in various sexual acts.”

Then came a gambit from the feds: They presented Hansen, who was only a suspect at the time, with the mundane sounding FD-1086 form. If he signed it, Hansen would grant investigators control of his accounts on Instagram and Kik, a Canadian-made chat app that’s become hugely popular among under-18s and, subsequently, child predators. Hansen signed them over. From April 12, 2017, to at least November 13, 2018, an undercover FBI agent working at the agency’s Salt Lake City office assumed Hansen’s online identity on Kik, according to a warrant application, filed in November 2018, for the Dropbox account belonging to a member of one of the private groups. Rather than shutting down the various Kik chat rooms with names like “Boy Poorn Lovers” [sic] to “Gaypervyoung,” the agent watched over a mass of child abuse material distributed over Kik for a year and a half. (There was no mention of Hansen’s use of Instagram in the warrant).

As of today, the FBI’s Kik sting marks the first publicly documented case in which the U.S. government took over the social media of a child pornography suspect. In doing so, the agents let child abuse material spread for months after they had identified it. Thus far the government has little to show for it; no subsequent prosecutions based on the protracted sting have emerged. The warrant also doesn’t disclose whether the agent distributed illegal content or simply tracked others’ activities. And there’s no indication as to when the chat rooms were shut down, if they ever were. The FBI and the DOJ declined to comment. The commandeered KitB10 account is no longer available on Kik, though the company said it’s never been notified by law enforcement of any undercover operation.

Smart policing or revictimizing children?

The case reintroduces tough questions over the merits of allowing harmful Web behavior in order to catch criminals committing the same wrongs on a larger scale. Those questions came to the fore with the capture and maintenance of dark Web child pornography site Playpen four years ago.

And it’s a situation likely to become more familiar as criminals manipulate lightly policed internet platforms whose users range in the billions. Last month, YouTube was forced to purge 400 channels after YouTuber Matt Watson showed that predators were time-stamping and commenting on videos in which children were in “sexually implicit positions.” Links to actual child pornography were placed in the comments to those videos, too. Major advertisers whose ads were shown alongside the videos swiftly ditched YouTube. The Google-owned streaming site said it was deeply concerned about the issue and last week banned all comments on videos containing children.

The sting operations are a double-edged sword: They can successfully help cops catch abusers and those who share exploitation imagery and video, and at the same time permit the revictimization of anyone featured in the material.

In the Utah operation, it appeared “anywhere from hundreds to thousands of children were revictimized as means to the government’s investigative ends,” said Adam M. Elewa, an associate with the law office of Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, a New York-based law firm that has defended those accused of child pornography charges. Hansen created multiple Kik groups for the trade of child abuse material and banned those who weren’t contributing, according to the search warrant. Hundreds of Kik users within those groups were seen sharing images and videos of minor boys “in various stages of undress in sexually explicit positions” and “engaging in sexual activity with adults or children.”

Distributing images of children being sexually abused violates their privacy and puts them at risk of being harmed again, said John Carr, a consultant who worked for Microsoft and the U.K. government on child exploitation and internet safety. “Abused children should not be used as bait.”

Consent to assume an identity

The government, though, believes taking control of suspects’ online personas is sometimes worth it. In two previous public cases, both looking into child abuse material crimes, police presented suspects with “consent to assume online identity” forms. In 2008, investigators took control of a suspect’s Yahoo account, and in 2009, the FBI acquired access to a real user account on a peer-to-peer file-sharing service. (Forbes could not find court documents showing how the police benefitted from that access).

The most controversial facilitation of child pornography occurred in February 2015, when the Department of Justice seized and ran Playpen. The site was hosted on Tor, widely known as the dark Web, where users’ identities are obscured by layers of encryption. For two weeks, police launched malicious code at visitors that would attempt to uncloak their IP address and, subsequently, their identity. But over that fortnight, the website’s performance improved and membership increased 30%, according to counsel for an administrator of Playpen, Steven Chase, who was eventually sentenced to 30 years for six counts related to the sharing and advertisement of child abuse content. By its own admission, the FBI said 9,000 images and 200 videos were made available by Playpen users while it operated the site from February 20 to March 4, 2015. An additional 13,000 links to child pornography were posted during the FBI’s administration of the site. Justifying the operation, the government said more than 200 prosecutions were subsequently launched and 49 American children rescued.

Shutting Playpen down immediately “might have ended child pornography trafficking on Playpen, but it would have come at a great cost: squandering any hope of identifying and apprehending the offenders responsible for engaging in hands-on exploitation as well as identifying and prosecuting those users,” the Justice Department wrote.

It’s unclear how many people, if any, are being investigated because of the undercover use of Hansen’s accounts. The lawyer for Hansen, who remains in jail in Englewood prison in Colorado, declined to comment. The only evidence of a follow-up investigation was in the same search warrant that detailed the undercover operation. Tracking a group called “Boy Links Only! Send on Entry or be Kicked” between April and May 2017, the FBI agent picked up on one user: “no_limits_bmx.” The user had been part of the group during a period in which members had shared “thousands of images/videos of child pornography.” But no charges have been filed against that user.

Even some advocates for the rights of child exploitation victims believe that sometimes the ugliness is justified when abusers are apprehended. “Every situation needs to be assessed,” Signy Arnason, associate executive director at the Canadian Center for Child Protection, told Forbes. “I’d assume this would be assessed by police ... that the outcome would justify some of the downsides.

“But you’d need some very serious permissions and approvals from above to be able to keep that stuff going.”

Kik and Instagram: platforms rife with abuse?

The Hansen sting also raises questions for Kik, which has been plagued by problems with child exploitation. In 2017, a Forbes investigation found that fake profiles posing as 14-year-olds were harassed by men within minutes of signing up. The report also detailed child exploitation content was being shared across the app and discovered cases where undercover officers were actively encouraging suspects to communicate on Kik. The company repeatedly failed to delete profiles of convicted sex offenders. It subsequently promised to invest more in cleaning up its platform.

Kik associate general counsel Ryan Tremblay, in a statement, said Kik wasn’t privy to law enforcement’s undercover investigations and had no way of knowing if specific accounts were being used by officers.

“Our current practice is to ban users as soon as we detect illegal content, either through our own internal systems, or after investigating users named in warrants and subpoenas issued to us by law enforcement. Previously, we did not conduct those latter investigations, which is one reason why accounts might have been left active even after a user was charged or convicted,” he added.

An Instagram spokesperson said: “We respond to valid legal requests but do not comment on specific cases.” Though there was no evidence Hansen or the police used his Instagram account to watch over child pornography, the Facebook-owned social platform isn’t immune from predators. Research from U.K. charity NSPCC found that in the 18 months leading up to September last year, there were more than 5,000 recorded crimes of sexual communication with a child on Instagram and a 200% rise in the abuse of children on the photo-messaging site. In response to that report, Instagram said it aggressively tries to keep child groomers and pornography off its service.