Federal prosecutors just shut down the 'largest child porn marketplace' on the dark web containing more than 200,000 videos

• Federal prosecutors have shut down the "largest dark web child porn marketplace" and charged a South Korean man with running it, NBC News first reported.
• The site hosted over 200,000 videos and processed $730,000 worth of transactions from 2015 to 2018, according to the criminal indictment.
• At least five US citizens have already been found guilty of criminal charges and sentenced in connection with the site.
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A 23-year-old South Korean man is facing multiple charges from US prosecutors for allegedly running the "largest dark web child porn marketplace" in the world, NBC News first reported Wednesday.

The site, called "Welcome to Video," was shut down in March 2018, years after it was first founded in June 2015. It hosted nearly 8 terabytes of child pornography including more than 200,000 videos depicting sex acts involving children and infants, according to the criminal indictment unsealed Tuesday.

The site operated on the dark web and used a bitcoin-backed point system for transactions, with users paying approximately $300 for an annual membership. In total, $730,000 worth of cryptocurrency transactions were made through the site.

Prosecutors charged Jong Woo Son with running the site. Son is already serving an 18-month prison sentence for child pornography charges in South Korea, after Korean law enforcement raided his home and found servers hosting the site in his bedroom in March 2018.

At least five US citizens have already been found guilty and sentenced for child pornography charges in connection with the site, in addition to more than 100 suspects who have been arrested in South Korea, according to NBC News. One defendant from Washington, D.C. was caught with more than 50 years of video footage downloaded from the site.

"Most of the users were in their 20s, unmarried and white-collar office workers and first-time offenders, although some were ex-convicts of sexual crimes including juvenile sex offenders. One possessed as many as 48,634 child porn [files]," the Korean National Police told NBC News.

The site explicitly solicited users to upload child pornography, according to the indictment. Its front page bore a message in red type that read, "Do not upload adult porn."