Unlikely, because the cops tend to prioritize going after bigger fish than that. It's part being realistic, they only have so many resources and trying to track down every idiot sharing links to CP is impossible, but there's also a big PR aspect to it. They like being able to point to a big bust like taking down a darknet CP site, because it sounds a lot more impressive than "we caught this idiot who uploaded a single CP image to an anime imageboard" or "we caught this idiot who was sending links to CP images hosted online to other idiots on an anime imageboard."

Another priority for them is new CP, which means a child is actively being abused. The toddlercon idiots were likely linking stuff they found online, which has been out there for a long time. In a lot of those cases the child in them has already been identified, rescued and their abuser arrested, making it a lower priority. That's another reason they like to go after big sites, as those often have private areas only available to pedos who upload new stuff.

Plus a lot of the time the people doing that are using VPNs that are difficult to trace or are outside the US (Gelbooru reports stuff to the FBI), so local authorities can't go after them anyway. They will pass the info along to the authorities in the other country in the latter case, so it's not risk free. It's just fairly rare for it to lead to arrests.

We report stuff to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which forwards the reports to the FBI and Interpol.

So have you (or Lozer) ever gotten an update or a follow up to anyone you've ever reported?

I remember seeing a reddit post of someone showing off how they got some actual toddler rapists arrested, and it had shown a document that was basically "these are the people who were arrested as a result of your tip". It had their mugshots and they were each sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

Not too sure how real it was looking back, but it looked very legitimate and I wonder if that's ever happened.

If it stays within the FBI, they usually leave us completely out of the loop.

Local police stations would be more likely to reach out. We include all of the information we have in the initial report, though, so there usually isn't really a reason for them to reach out for more information.

In most US jurisdictions, legal processes are kept need-to-know. Florida's policy of literally everything being public is pretty uncommon. It's not really likely that they'd get back to us for anything other than getting additional information.

I think Lozer or Jerl told me once that it was mostly IP's from Russia or China at one point so good luck with that.

I'm absolutely certain the FBI wouldn't do something like that. Pretty much the only way they'd even tell you the outcome of your tip is if you worked with them as a confidential informant, providing lots of information on someone you were in regular contact with online and feeding information to the FBI to help in prosecuting them. Reports from any website aren't going to get feedback from them.

Some local police might do it though, it'd depend on how the chief of that force runs it. Some like to show off, so providing a document like that would be something they'd do. Most are tight-lipped as well, though.

Yeah local police makes more sense for that. Got it.


Fair point, however I still hear schmucks getting caught and arrested with CP when I turn on the local news. These people definitely seem to be the low level idiots who aren't any big time dealers and only share a video or two.

Those are the low-hanging fruit that they manage to find with minimal to no effort and are usually for possession of child porn only, not distribution or molesting a child. If they actually need to spend a lot of time investigating to identify someone from a tip they'll ignore it. Easy arrests let them present a "we're doing something about child porn/pedophiles!" PR front without doing any hard work to actually prevent child sex abuse.