An Australian man has been charged after authorities linked him to a cryptocurrency account used to buy child exploitation material.
An investigation, following a tip off from US authorities in December last year, traced the account back to a 27-year-old man from Sydney.
On Friday, the NSW Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team searched the man’s house and found several devices, including hard drives, and a mobile phone.
The police will claim these devices were used to access and download child exploitation material.
The man was arrested and charged with one count of using a carriage service to access child pornography material and three counts of possessing child abuse material.
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He is expected to appear in court today.
It’s not the first time that cryptocurrency or blockchain technology have been associated with child exploitation material.
Back in February, we reported on how a change to the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision protocol had inadvertently led to child exploitation material being posted to its blockchain.
More recently, in May, a man in the US received a 42 month prison sentence for purchasing, downloading, and concealing child abuse imagery he bought on the dark web using Bitcoin.
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