Yahoo News 
10,000 Britons signed up to one of the world’s largest paedophile networks
As many as 10,000 Britons signed up to paedophile network on the Dark Web, it has emerged.
A former school governor and NHS employee are among those who registered with Paradise Village, which, with 80,000 users, was one of the world’s largest paedophile websites.
Members on the forum, who brazenly discussed their sexual interests in children and shared sickening images of child abuse, protected their identities by using software called Tor, an investigation by The Times has revealed.
Usernames, email addresses and passwords were placed on the open web after the network’s server, Freedom Hosting II, was hacked in February.
The newspaper reports that information on 50 British users, whose login details appear to match those used to create profiles on social media, will be passed to the National Crime Agency (NCA) today.
Last week, the paper reported that more than 280 suspected British paedophiles had been arrested for using Playpen, a forum that was shut down by the FBI in 2015.
Many of its 150,000 users appear to have moved to Freedom Hosting II, which mainly hosts child abuse forums.
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The sever, the successor to Freedom Hosting, which hosted at least 23 child abuse websites, is believed to have been run by Eric Eoin Marques, a US-born Irish citizen who lives in Dublin.
He is currently appealing against an American request to extradite him from Ireland on charges of conspiring to distribute and advertise child pornography.
He has been described by the FBI as “the largest facilitator of child porn in the world,” but has previously denied being the owner of the hosting site.
The Dark Web is a collection of websites that exist on an encrypted network that cannot be found by using traditional search engines. Nearly all sites hide their identity using the Tor encryption tool.
