INTERNATIONAL Online Child Predators: The Lost Boy Bulletin Board (Part 1)

Jeffrey Greenwell

Wraped like a virtue inside a bend of the Meramec River at Miramiguoa Park is a remarkably secluded piece of real estate. Surrounded on three sides by the river, the sparsely populated 200 Acre village with 120 residents, guards its upcountry flank with the completeness of the Meramec State Park, whose borders stretch south and west through the Franklin County Ozarks.

The Meramec River, Missouri

To get to Miramiguoa Park you must stay on Interstate 44 all the way to Sullivan, then exit and circle through several miles of deep Missouris forestterrain.

Around this beautyful landscape, in 2009, a little house in Miramiguoa Park was getting on the focus by Law Enforcement. By then, on the front door of that tiny house there has been a sticky sticker of the well known cartoon hero Scooby-Doo. From here on "Scooby-Doo" would play a major role in one of the most significant busts of an international acting Pedophile-Ring:
The Lost Boy Bulletin Board.

Greenwells house, the start of a falling Pedophile-Ring

The man who rented that house was almost unknown to neighbors in the area. No one took much notice of him (nor of the young boy who showed up every now and then).

On October 23rd, 2009, a breezy afternoon, a team of five state and federal law-enforcement agents drove to Miramiguoa Park and took up positions to offer them a plain sight to that unimpressive cottage. Two additional officers stationed themselves up the access road, just outside the village. The weeks before, Missouri Law enforcement, local and federal, had been investigating tips comming from the FBI Los Angeles Field Division, concerning the man who rented this specific cottage.

Then they waited for the man inside the house, to show up, to come out.

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AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE

Steven Martinez, assistant director in charge of the FBI in Los Angeles said something very important to the LOST BOY CASE, so public should be aware what is happening every day around us (IN PLAIN SIGHT):

"The Lost Boy case represents a global subculture that exists for the purpose of trading of child pornography and other tools used to sexually exploit children. The FBI and our partners in Los Angeles and globally will continue to work together to identify these networks and to pursue charges against those who abuse children."

Brian Mize is a genuine, approved computer geek. A computer forensic investigator from St.Louis, who is assigned as a Special Federal Agent with the FBI Cyber Division. Mize also teached different Internet-investigation techniques at the St. Louis County Police Academy . He also attended local and national hacker conferences in undercover. Mize is as well a member of RCCEEG.

Brian Mize (left)

One of Mize's investigative "specialties" is child pornography above child exploitation. His capabilities resume back to the decade of Video Home System (VHS). He participated then, in the infamous Michael Devlin case, where Devlin, a Imo's Pizza Pizza-manager, kidnapped 13-year-old William Benjamin Ownby, whom he kept hostage and molested for four years.

The nightmare ended on January 12th, 2007, when LE Officers found another missing teenage boy, Shawn Hornbeck at Devlins Place. Hornbeck had disappeared on October 6th, 2002, at the age of eleven, while riding his bike to a friend's house in Richwoods, Missouri. No one had heard from Hornbeck ever again, until he was discovered in Devlin's apartment back that day. Devlin is currently serving 74 life sentences for these crimes.

Devlin after his arrest in 2007

Mize often educates parents and teachers about how much easier child molestation has become in the digital era, when so many youngsters are outfitted with smartphones and tablets.

The nonprofit Organisation National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) reported in 2009, that it received over 17 million pornographic images and videos through its Victim Identification Program (VIP), twice as much as in 2008.

"It's no longer a five-foot cord attached to the wall. Bad guys have unprecedented access to communication with kids, and it's made things more dangerous", Mize stated.

Beneath Mize's desk sits a enormous Computer that would overpower any ordinary CPU-workstation. Known as FRED (Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device) the PC-facility is designed to create Bit-for-Bit replicas of each piece of electronic evidence investigators seize in a case, and to simplify the process of decrypting data that has been rendered unreadable and password-protected.

A "FRED" Tower

In the fall of 2009, FRED's capabilities were put to the test, after a fellow FBI teammate called to summon him to a small house in the southern Franklin County Outback.

A year earlier, in October 2008, FBI agents in Los Angeles got some information (Two men, a Danish and an Italian national contacted the FBI Bureau in Copenhagen to give the tip), from the bureau's legal attaché in Copenhagen, Denmark, indicating that two men, Harout Hagop Sarafian (Inmate of FCI Lompoc) of North Hollywood and Woodrow Tracy (Inmate of FCI Coleman Low, Florida) of Sun Valley, had traveled to Romania the previous year in order to have sex with young boys.

After obtaining federal warrants, the Los Angeles Sexual Assault and Felony Enforcement Team (S.A.F.E.), a task force comprising federal prosecutors and law-enforcement officers at local, state and federal level, arrested both men and seized computer equipment that turned out to contain a bounty of child pornography.

Both Sarafian and Tracy, confessed to investigators that they belonged to a group that called itself "Lost Boy", an international network of pedophiles, who exchanged extensive amounts of child pornography, including pictures and videos depicting men sexually molesting young boys.

"Lost Boy" operated a password-protected, online forum (the forum was registered in 2007), that allowed members to post digital images and discuss each other's contributions and experiences. The Network also made use of a popular file-sharing site, notifying fellow members, by posting samples on the Lost Boy forum along with links to downloadable files.

Part 2:   

• http://stayaway2.blogspot.com/2014/01/international-online-child-predators.html

Part 3:   

• http://stayaway2.blogspot.com/2014/01/international-online-child-predators_11.html

Part 4:   

• http://stayaway2.blogspot.com/2014/01/international-online-child-predators_16.html

Part 5:   

• http://stayaway2.blogspot.com/2014/01/international-online-child-predators_25.html