DOJ Shuts Down Online Child Abuse Network With 120K Members, Millions Of Files

When FBI agents arrived outside William Spearman’s home in the quiet suburb of Madison, Alabama, in November 2022, they were prepared for danger.

Their search warrant was so important to the bureau that it was approved by the FBI director himself. When the agents breached Spearman’s door with tactical explosives, Spearman fought back, tussling with the agents as three of his handguns remained barely out of reach. The FBI managed to handcuff and arrest Spearman, a high-value arrest, in what a top Justice Department official called “one of the most successful” prosecutions of its kind.

Spearman went by the nickname “Boss” and was labeled by the Justice Department as “one of the most significant” purveyors of child sex abuse material in the world. His arrest in 2022, his guilty plea a year later and his eventual life sentence were part of an unprecedented takedown of a prodigious child abuse network.

Spearman is one of at least 18 people convicted so far of leading and utilizing the dark web to share hundreds of thousands of unlawful sexually exploitative images of children. The Justice Department calls the investigation and prosecutions Operation Grayskull; it helped secure those arrests and shutter four heavily trafficked dark web sites where violent and horrific images of child sexual abuse were traded and housed.

The Operation Grayskull investigation launched in 2020, when law enforcement agents noticed a spike in traffic to a dark web site suspected of hosting child abuse material. The dark web child abuse sites eventually attracted more than 120,000 members, millions of files and at least 100,000 visits in a single day, according to an FBI official who spoke with CBS News.