One of the world’s most wanted pedophiles, who abused dozens of children between the ages of two and 16, has been captured and jailed for close to 50 years after Australian authorities tracked him down to a COVID-19 quarantine facility in Malaysia.

For at least 14 years, Alladin Lanim was found to have sexually abused dozens of children in a sleepy, seaside town called Lundu in Sarawak, Malaysia. 

The 40-year-old man posted his heinous activities on the dark web and boasted on message boards about recording his acts, according to a detailed report published by the Sydney Morning Herald. Using an anonymous online profile, he was also said to have been sharing child abuse material online since 2007, and had been linked to more than 1,000 images and videos depicting sexual abuse of minors.

“He was so prolific with so many victims, that’s why he became a high priority,” Daniel Burnicle, a detective sergeant from the Australian Federal Police (AFP), told the Australian newspaper from Kuala Lumpur. 

“He was so prolific with so many victims.”

Analysis conducted by Australian victim identification specialists initially identified a total of 34 victims who had been abused by Alladin, but authorities warned that the actual number may be higher. 

Officials on the case, trawling through records and hundreds of images, made a breakthrough last year and came across a possible image of Alladin. He was finally apprehended and jailed last month following a painstaking two-year international investigation by Australian and Malaysian authorities. “It’s just a slow, methodical burn,” Burnicle said.

“They’re going through images trying to work out where that location may be so they can follow up. It’s all very difficult with the dark web to track people.”

Alladin was apprehended at a COVID-19 isolation facility on July 5 while serving out a mandatory quarantine after returning to Sarawak, and charged with 18 counts of molesting five boys on a plantation and inducing them to watch pornographic videos by offering to let them play a mobile game on his phone. Malaysian police also say that they are pursuing one more case of child abuse involving Alladin.

He pleaded guilty in court in the state capital Kuching, and was jailed for 48 years and six months and sentenced to 15 strokes of the cane. 

In a statement provided to VICE World News on Monday, AFP commander Warwick Macfarlane said the cross-border investigation that led to Alladin’s arrest was an indication that the pandemic had not obstructed transnational policing efforts, and that authorities around the world were still working tirelessly to combat the exploitation and abuse of children.

Alladin’s arrest is the latest in a string of recent child exploitation busts by Australian authorities, following the AFP’s involvement in cracking open a global pedophile ring last year. A spokesperson told VICE World News last September that the amount of child abuse material being shared on the dark web appeared to be increasing, and that some sites hosting online child sex abuse material had crashed due to the overwhelming amount of internet traffic.

In Malaysia, reports of Alladin’s arrest shook the country – prompting outrage online about how a serial pedophile was able to operate in the country, undetected, for so long. Others referenced the case of another convicted pedophile, British man Richard Huckle – who had sexually abused scores of children in various communities in Kuala Lumpur, where he lived – and decried the laid-back reaction of authorities.

“Local authorities need to step up their game,” one Malaysian tweeted. Another wrote: “We have high profile pedophiles arrested by foreign police at least twice now. If this were left to us, these pedos would be scot free and happily ravaging new victims.”

Responding to news of Alladin’s capture by Australian police, Malaysian women’s minister Fatimah Abdullah said her ministry would better protect children against pedophiles and would continue educating not just children but also their parents.

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More people are buying their drugs on the dark web than any other time in recorded history, according to the findings of the latest Global Drug Survey (GDS). 

Researchers found that in 2020, 15 percent of GDS participants who reported using drugs in the previous 12 months obtained them from darknet marketplaces—either by purchasing them first-hand or via someone else. This equated to a threefold increase of the percentage of people who reported the same in 2014, when the survey first started measuring the trend.

Over the past seven years that number has steadily climbed, but never as significantly as it did in 2020: jumping by four percent of the total respondents compared to 2019 levels. And the global pandemic is only part of the reason.

Dr Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at Melbourne’s RMIT University and co-lead researcher of the GDS, told VICE World News that cultural trends, shifting taboos, market innovators and a growing population of people who spend more of their lives online are all likely contributors to the significant increase in dark web drug crime.

“If you’re coming of age in 2021—say you’re 18 or 19 years old—this isn’t that odd to you; there’s been 10 years since Silk Road was founded in 2011, so you’ve sort of grown up with it,” Dr Barratt explained over the phone. “Partly, I think, that cultural difference and generational difference may explain why this is happening.

“If you buy everything online, why wouldn’t you also buy your drugs online?”

It is for this latter reason in particular, she suggests, that darknet drug markets may have attracted more new customers in 2020 than any previous year.

“When you think about it, in the last 12 months there were many people who weren’t really keen on buying things online, but who had to buy things online because they had no choice; the shops weren’t open and they were in lockdown and they needed to use the post to get goods to them,” she noted. “I think once they get over that hump some people will decide that they want to continue not going shopping for clothes and only using the Internet—and they may feel the same way about everything.”

There is some anecdotal precedent for this trend of homebody buyers. In 2017, Dr Barratt sought to find out why it was that Scandinavian countries like Finland consistently reported the world’s highest proportion of drug buyers who were using the dark web to purchase their supply. A local source explained that, due in part to the climate and the prohibitively cold weather, Finnish people are typically “more isolated” than other peoples around the world and “tend to stay home”. 

“He said it makes perfect sense to him, culturally, that they would be one of the highest users of the [drug] servers that deliver to home,” Dr Barratt recalled. “And the question is: ‘Well, where else would they buy from?’”

That goes some way toward explaining the cultural patterns. But another factor that’s worthy of consideration is the way in which drug dealers and darknet vendors are diversifying their offering and creating a more reliable service—even in the face of transnational cybercrime crackdowns and rampant fraudulent activity.

Dr Barratt points to a dark web marketplace that introduced multi-signature authentication a few years ago, as a way to insulate buyers and sellers against so-called “exit scams”—when the site administrator runs away with people’s funds—and garner some trust from consumers. Other operators have gone even further, leveraging social media apps and chatrooms to create new channels of illegal commerce: like Televend, the fully-automated system that allows users to buy drugs from bots via the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

“What happens is that everyone innovates: the people who are selling drugs on the darknet, and the people who are producing these new applications, they try to work out what the issues are that mean people aren’t taking up their particular platform,” Dr Barratt explained. “Maybe it’s just a bit too hard to go on the darknet, but people like to use messaging apps. So Televend is sort of like a cross between social media app-purchasing and the darknet. And I’m just fascinated as to whether the future of the darknet might be some other hybrid thing that has only just begun.”

These trends are likely to continue, as online marketplaces become more sophisticated and more people turn to e-commerce outlets to score their illegal products. But this brave new world of darknet drug-dealing is fraught with pitfalls and slippery slopes.

One unsurprising consequence is that it gives consumers unprecedented ease of access to illicit—and oftentimes mysterious—substances. Each year, somewhere around a quarter to a third of GDS respondents say that they’ve consumed a wider range of drugs since using the dark web. The breadth of the darknet’s product offering, combined with the relatively low barrier to entry, creates gateways to novel drug-using behaviours, where people try new substances just because they’ve suddenly been made available to them.

But another worrying knock-on effect is that people who buy drugs off the darknet, rather than through a contact or a friend, may be using those drugs alone.

For that reason, Dr Barratt urged darknet drug users to stay diligent and exercise caution—and, wherever possible, to let someone else know what they’re going to be consuming, as well as when and where.

“It may be that a person’s entire experience of using drugs has actually started through the darknet, and may indeed be confined to the darknet,” she explained. “The risk of that is that they may be using alone—so one of the things to consider is ensuring that if you are going to take something for the first time, even if you’re alone, that somebody out there knows you’re about to do this, and somebody out there has a ‘check-in with me in an hour’ and has your details. 

“That’s hard, obviously; this stuff is mostly illegal and a lot of people are secretive about what they’re doing. But the concern would be that someone buys something, maybe takes the wrong dose or the wrong drug or they're having a bad time, and they don’t necessarily have someone with them.”

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Earlier this month, German authorities arrested a 34-year-old Australian man who was accused of being the primary administrator behind DarkMarket: the largest illegal marketplace on the darknet.

The site, which boasted almost half a million users, more than 2400 sellers and some $170 million USD worth of transactions, allowed anyone with a Tor browser and some cryptocurrency to buy and sell drugs, forged money, stolen credit cards, anonymous SIM cards and malware. It was shut down shortly after the Australian man’s arrest.

The crackdown didn’t stop there, though. Last week, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) executed a series of search warrants across Brisbane and the Gold Coast, in Queensland, in connection to the shutdown of DarkMarket. Across Wednesday and Thursday, authorities seized a laptop, four mobile phones, six USB thumb drives and five hard drives, as well as SIM cards and bank cards.

Cybercrime Operations and Digital Forensic Teams are reviewing the seized items, and police say they aren’t ruling out further arrests as a result of their findings.

They believe Australian criminals most likely operated on DarkMarket and purchased illicit products via the site.

“Some of these items could have been used or acquired by Australians in Australia,” said Jayne Crossling, Acting Commander of Investigations with AFP Southern Command, in a statement. “If police knew there was criminal activity occurring in geographic location, action would be taken. 

“There is no difference with the dark web, although the anonymising features of the dark web makes it harder for law enforcement to identify perpetrators, who commit abhorrent crimes.”

Despite these apparent difficulties, January has been an eventful month in relation to the seizure and prosecution of international cybercriminals.

Three days after DarkMarket was taken offline, another, mid-seized illegal marketplace named Yellow Brick Market (YBM) disappeared from the dark web without warning—along with all of its users' cryptocurrency. Rumours suggest that a worker at DarkMarket also worked at YBM.

A day later, the owner of a Bulgaria-based cryptocurrency exchange, allegedly designed for the purpose of money laundering and used by fraudsters and online criminals, was sentenced to 121 months in prison.

Last Monday, a father and son in the Netherlands were each sentenced to three-and-a-half years behind bars for selling drugs on the dark web. And on Friday, a New Zealand man who tried to buy a three-year-old girl on the dark web, with the intention of using her as a sex slave, was jailed for five years.

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