August 20, 2024
SINGAPORE – For about eight years, a man downloaded child pornography from the dark web before categorising his collection to store on his personal electronic devices and online platforms.
Court documents did not disclose how his offence came to light, but Gan Qi Xuan, 26, was caught following a raid on Aug 25, 2023, at his home, where officers uncovered 178 videos and 153 still images of such content.
On Aug 19, 2024, he pleaded guilty to one count of being in possession of child pornography. He is expected to be sentenced on Aug 30.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Koh Yi Wen told the court: “These offences are particularly egregious considering the extreme vulnerability of the victims depicted in child abuse material.”
Gan got to know about the dark web around 2015 and found a forum on child pornography on it. But he did not download anything during his first visit as he was wary of viruses.
About three months later, he grew curious and decided to download such videos and images from the dark web, including child abuse material.
The DPP said: “For each video that the accused downloaded, he would watch the first 10 or 20 seconds before skipping forward a few minutes until the end of the video. He would also watch each video about two or three times.”
Soon after, Gan began to access the dark web regularly to download pornographic material, including those involving children.
He would view the videos and images he downloaded before sorting them into different folders on his laptop.
When the device ran out of storage space, he transferred all the material to his Google Drive account.
His laptop broke down in mid-2021, and he replaced it with a central processing unit later that year.
During this time, he also created a cloud storage account to store his pornographic material as the platform provided more free storage space than Google Drive.
Gan, who was not represented by a lawyer, told the court on Aug 19 that he had downloaded the unlawful materials out of curiosity, and not due to “pleasure”.
He added: “I deeply regret what I did… my entire social life was online.”
Multiple men were given jail sentences last week over offences linked to child pornography.
On Aug 16, Wang Dian, 27, who was found with 57 video clips of children engaging in sexual activities, was sentenced to 15 months and two weeks’ jail.
Liew Yih Fui, 31, was sentenced to 21 months’ jail on Aug 16 after he downloaded over 750 child pornography videos.
On Aug 15, Eugene Quake, 40, who downloaded child sexual abuse material and made obscene films at his condominium unit, was sentenced to 13 months’ jail.
In 2020, the teacher had joined several Telegram chat groups where members frequently shared homosexual pornography.
For being in possession of child pornography, an offender can be jailed for up to five years and fined or caned.