The man arrested for running what was once believed to be the largest child abuse hosting provider on the dark web, has pleaded guilty in a US court to the charge of advertising child pornography.
That service was Freedom Hosting and the man who operated it from its founding in 2008 until his arrest in Ireland in 2013 was dual US-Irish national, Eric Eoin Marques.
Extradited to the US last year, what Marques has admitted to carries a mandatory sentence of 15 years, with up to double that possible when he is sentenced by a Maryland court in May. He has already spent nearly seven years in custody.
Said the Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General, General Brian A. Benczkowski:
The defendant’s anonymous web service hosted dozens of insidious criminal communities dedicated to the sexual exploitation of children and spread millions of images of that abuse.
Marques undoubtedly made a lot of money from the hosting business, to the extent that police seized $155,000 in US currency during his arrest.