Authorities have dismantled Kidflix, a streaming platform that offered child sexual abuse material ( CSAM ), in one of the largest coordinated law enforcement operations.
Between April 2022 and March 2025, Europol reported in a speech that 1.8 million people logged onto the platform globally. The site, which at the moment contained about 72, 000 videos, was seized by German and Dutch government on March 11, 2025.
It was described as the biggest operation ever conducted to fight child sexual abuse by the German law enforcement agency. It bears the name Operation Stream.
1, 393 were identified internationally through an analysis of payment transactions during the investigation, which began in 2022 and engaged 38 countries around the world, with 79 of them being detained to date for distributing CSAM. Some of the apprehended people have also been accused of abusing children in addition to sharing and watching for content.
Additionally, more than 3, 000 electrical equipment have been seized. The investigation is still ongoing.
Kidflix was founded in 2021 and has since amassed a collection of 91, 000 unique movies, according to Europol. On average, approximately 3.5 novel videos were uploaded to the system every hours.
After making payments using cryptocurrencies, which were then converted into tokens, the app, which had about 190, 000 registered users as of April 2022 and up until its shutdown, offered the ability to both save and supply the information.
Violators may make currencies, which were then used to see content, according to Europol, by uploading CSAM, investigating film titles and descriptions, and assigning categories to videos.
Each movie was uploaded in “low, medium, and large quality,” which allowed criminals to demo the content and demand payment to access the higher-quality versions.
However, the identified criminals only account for a small portion of the 1.8 million people suspected of using the app between April 2022 and March of this year. According to French officers, 13 suspects have been identified in the Netherlands, despite the fact that no arrests have been made so far.
Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Malta, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States were among the participating nations.
According to Catherine De Bolle, Europol Executive Director,” The digital dimension has led to a rapid development in online kid sexual exploitation, providing offenders with a global platform to contact and groom victims, as well as to make, store, and exchange child sexual abuse material.”
Some people claim that this is just a technical or digital problem, but it is not. These acts are actually committed by real people, and those victims are kids.
The European Commission recently a new domestic security technique called ProtectEU to better identify digital threats, combat severe and organized crimes, and discuss intelligence across the region.
In accordance with the effort, the Commission is expected to “present a Technology Roadmap on cryptography” to identify and evaluate scientific options to allow law enforcement to access data legally in 2026.
The idea, it continued, is to “identify and evaluate modern options that would enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a constitutional way, safeguarding security and basic right.”