Man Accused of Running Online Child Porn Ring Extradited to U.S.

A Ukrainian man who authorities said ran an online child pornography site is in U.S custody today after losing a three-year extradition battle, the U.S. Attorney’s office said at a news conference in Newark.

Maksym Shynkarenko, 33, was brought to America this weekend from Thailand, where he had been in custody since 2009 after being arrested while on vacation. A 32-count indictment states Shynkarenko founded a Ukraine-based site with thousands of customers across the world, including 30 from New Jersey and one from Brick.

Shynkarenko was expected to appear in Newark federal court today.

“He may be the most significant distributor of child pornography ever prosecuted in the United States, and the investigation which led to this achievement has been the most successful national child pornography investigation to date,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said.

Shynkarenko’s extradition marks the latest step in an investigation that began in October 2005, when law enforcement discovered emails from a Long Branch man who had been the target of a separate child pornography investigation. Authorities declined to release additional information about the man today.

The emails led investigators to a website titled “Illegal.CP.,” where viewers were invited to join what was described as “the best child porn site on the net!” An agent from the Newark office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), posing as a subscriber, soon afterwards bought a 20-day subscription for $79.99. The site advised users that they could possibly avoid prosecution by using credit cards, because “it is very difficult to establish you were the person to pay.”

The ring allegedly used other layers of subterfuge to insulate itself. Subscribers were billed by a company called “AdSoft,” which posed as a legitimate business, and the site also employed remote servers in Ukraine and the United States.

To crack the ring and to find the subscribers, authorities tapped Shynkarenko’s email and investigated credit card processors.

The early phases of the  investigation focused on clients, leading to the arrests to date of 567 people, all men, in 47 states, including at least 20 who were also abusing children themselves.

“They include members of law enforcement, doctors, teachers, clergy and other figures of public trust,” said Andrew McLees, special agent in charge of ICE-Homeland Security Investigations.

Fishman today took great pains to describe the ghastly nature of the crimes captured on the website, where the suffering of children allegedly yielded a profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for Shynkarenko and his co-conspirators.

“When we use the term child pornography... we tend to minimalize or trivialize what it is because it makes it easier for us to think about it. It is not simply naked pictures or lewd pictures of unsuspecting children, although that would be bad enough,” Fishman said. “What we’re talking about are pictures, images and video, of the brutal sexual assault and torture by adults of young children.”

In New Jersey, dozens of men have been arrested for subscribing to the site, including Terrance McCord of Brick, Robert Rigney of Lakewood, Layne Bracht of Matawan, Jonathan Burke of Keyport, Stephen Lasher of Verona, George Payne of Hoboken and Charles Morgan of Willingboro.

If convicted, Shynkarenko faces up to life in prison.