Dark web child abuse forum administrators jailed

The second moderator of a dark web forum for sharing indecent pictures of children to be jailed within a week has today received five years and four months in prison.

William Yates, 45, admitted running The Annex, a membership-only forum which hosted a number of areas dedicated to child sexual abuse. The site worked by promoting users from guests to members by live chat participation and sharing imagery.

Investigators in Germany started focusing on The Annex in 2019 and seized servers in Romania and Moldova. From this they were able to identify the hierarchy of the management as well as users.

CPS prosecutors have been involved since the early stages of the investigation, providing legal advice to the National Crime Agency as well as liaising with law enforcement bodies across the world. The purpose of this was to ensure all suspects identified in England and Wales would face justice for their roles in the illegal sites and global distribution of images of child abuse.

Lawyers also looked through the evidence collected in order to demonstrate the scale of the offenders’ illegal acts, in order for them to face the appropriate sentence and to protect children in the future from sexual abuse.

One user – “yates704” – acted as a Gateway Assistant Moderator. An investigation by the National Crime Agency found that the user was a 42-year-old man calling himself Martin Yates. Further work helped officers identify Yates’s IP address and his physical address in Eastbourne, Sussex.

The seized server showed Yates had engaged in more than 6,000 private messages with other Annex users between March and September 2020, ranging from fantasy role play to providing advice to users on how to post indecent images of children.

Images that Yates had posted were uncovered by police in Australia and an FBI investigation in the United States of America revealed WhatsApp videos of Yates.

When he was interviewed Yates admitted being an Annex user since 2019. He had been offered a role as a staff member and then as moderator, where he would promote or demote users.

Specialist prosecutor Emma Lile, of the CPS Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit, said: “Yates worked his way up the site’s hierarchy by posting indecent content, then encouraged others to do the same.

“Our international work was vital in ensuring we had a strong case against Yates so that he will no longer be able to spread imagery or encourage the abuse of children.”

Nathan Bake, 28, from Runcorn, was the second in command of the Annex and had been since November 2022. On February 14, he was jailed for 16 years.

Bake’s role was to encourage users to keep the site busy. He posted more than 600 times over a 10-week period from August to October 2022, but had been a member for two-and-a-half years. Bake’s messages linked to indecent images of children.

He was also a head moderator of another site providing a number of links to child exploitation sites and a co-creator of a further website, which had the sole purpose of discussing and posting indecent images of children.
Bake was identified after FBI officers obtained a copy of the server hosting The Annex. When his home and devices were searched by NCA officers, they discovered more than 3.5 million images including some classed as extreme, as well as a paedophile manual.

The majority of defendants identified are facing justice in America. Yates is the third to be sentenced in the UK, following Bake and Kabir Garg, 33, a junior doctor from Lewisham, London, who received a six-year jail term in June last year. Garg was fourth or fifth in the hierarchy of The Annex.

Nicola Haywood, unit head of the Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit at the CPS, said: “These online organisers of child sexual abuse thought they could hide under anonymity on the dark web.

“But thanks to the expertise of lawyers at the CPS Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit, through coordination of international investigations, we have been able to unravel their senior roles within this atrocious website and ensure they face justice and help stop further abuse.”