Operation Avalanche (child pornography investigation)

Operation Avalanche was a major United States investigation of child pornography on the Internet launched in 1999 after the arrest and conviction of Thomas and Janice Reedy, who operated an Internet pornography business called Landslide Productions in Fort Worth, Texas. It was made public in early August 2001 at the end of Operation Avalanche, that 100 arrests were made out of 144 suspects. It was followed by Operation Ore in the United Kingdom, Operation Snowball in Canada, Operation Pecunia in Germany, Operation Amethyst in Ireland and Operation Genesis in Switzerland.

Although US prosecutions were made on the basis of other evidence, later reconstruction of the Landslide site and review of the computer hard drives in the UK identified flaws in the police forensic procedures used and contradicted evidence on the website given at the Reedys' trial. Specifically, investigation of the Landslide data indicated many names listed were victims of credit card fraud, and that there was no link on the Landslide front page to take the user to child pornography sites as stated in sworn trial testimony.

Thomas Reedy was a self-taught computer programmer and entrepreneur living in the Fort Worth, Texas, area. He trained and worked as a nurse but, understanding the financial possibilities of the Internet, he set up an adult pornography website that provided a comfortable income. He soon developed a better strategy to provide middleman services for the adult pornography industry. In 1997 he set up Landslide Productions, Inc., which he ran with his wife Janice, who handled bookkeeping for the company. Landslide quickly became an adult pornography empire stretching across three continents, with some 300,000 subscribers in 60 countries. Within two years the company made $10 million and provided the owners a luxurious lifestyle.

Landslide provided payment systems for adult webmasters from different countries. The systems were automated; webmasters could sign up to the system online, and users accessing the websites would go through the payment or login system before being granted access. The principal systems were AVS for Adult Verification System and Keyz because it operated via the keyz.com domain name owned by Landslide.

The AVS system was meant to legally protect the companies from laws against disseminating pornography to minors, as the credit card was used to verify that the user attempting to access a particular website was of legal age to view the website's content. Users could sign up with their credit cards to access affiliated sites, which received 65% of the sign-up fee, while Landslide took the remainder and handled the transactions with the credit card companies.

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