International operation leads to 95 arrests in child sexual abuse material distribution case

Law enforcement authorities from 17 countries in Latin America and Europe arrested 95 suspects in INTERPOL-coordinated Operation Confluencia between March and September 2026, targeting distribution of child sexual abuse material through online messaging groups. Investigators executed 127 search warrants and rescued a five-year-old victim whose parent had been producing and selling abuse material online. Ecuadorian authorities found one suspect with approximately 15GB of CSAM and more than 4,000 files; Panamanian investigators arrested an administrator of a CSAM group with over 700 users; in Argentina, a suspect in contact with over 260 girls worldwide is accused of sextortion after allegedly threatening victims who refused requests for increasingly explicit content.

Guardii's anti-sextortion and anti-CSAM detection modules, developed in partnership with Meta and backed by Startmate, monitor direct-message exchanges for the coercion, escalation and transaction patterns characteristic of sexual extortion and abuse-material solicitation. Unlike retrospective investigation that depends on a child reporting or a file being uploaded and matched, real-time conversation analysis flags sustained pressure, threats contingent on compliance, and requests for images that match documented sextortion scripts before the abuse image is created or shared, enabling rapid escalation to the appropriate authority and blocking hostile contact at the point of first approach rather than after material has circulated across jurisdictions.