Tacoma, Washington, October 11, 2000 - An anonymous complaint submitted to an online crime reporting system sparked a nationwide cooperative effort that led to the arrest of a Eureka, California man suspected of distributing child pornography.

Raynham, Massachusetts Police Department Officer Thor Lundberg, who with his brother, Eric, Computer Forensic Specialist with the Massachusetts Attorney General's Computer Crime Unit, developed "Cybersnitch," the online crime reporting system that ignited the investigation.

On October 30, 1999, the Cybersnitch system received a report from an anonymous Internet user who complained of being solicited by email to view an Internet site containing child pornography. The report was picked up and investigated by a Cybersnitch member, who then worked closely with the High Tech Crime Consortium to escalate the investigation to the appropriate agency.

The High Tech Crime Consortium has a membership of a thousand law enforcement officers from the United States and 14 countries and often follows up on complaints submitted to Cybersnitch.

In this case, an HTCC member in Washington State traced the suspect’s address to WebTV, an Internet Service Provider based in Mountain View, California. That information was handed off to an investigator with the Sonoma County, California District Attorney’s Office, who worked with Mountain View Police Department and determined that the suspect resided in Eureka, California. FBI Innocent Images Unit Special Agents and Eureka Police Department investigators arrested the suspect early this week.

The suspect’s computer contained over a thousand images of child pornography, reported Sonoma County DA Investigator Ed Hudson, who added that the suspect’s name is not being released due to an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI and US Customs.

Cybersnitch and the High Tech Crime Consortium would like to publicly thank the anonymous complainant whose timely report led to the arrest.

Report online crimes at [http://www.cybersnitch.net].