A 35-year-old man operating from China ran the largest fraudulent dark web network ever dismantled and the most disturbing detail is not the scale of the infrastructure he built, but what he was selling — child sexual abuse material that did not exist, to thousands of buyers who paid for it anyway.

On March 9, a global operation led by German authorities and supported by Europol was launched against one of the largest networks of fraudulent platforms in the dark web. The investigation began in mid-2021 against the dark web platform "Alice with Violence CP." During the investigation, authorities discovered that the platform's operator ran more than 373,000 fraudulent websites advertising ch...