Hurtcore

Matthew Graham was a university student in Melbourne, living at his parents’ house, when he began building a set of hidden websites devoted to the abuse of children. He was nineteen when he took the name Lux and started Hurt2theCore, a site that required new members to upload material before they were let in. He ran the whole operation from his bedroom, and his family had no idea.

Graham never met a victim. What he did was host the material, write the rules, and push other users to commit offenses against children overseas and record them. An investigation that drew in the FBI, the Australian Federal Police, Europol and Victoria Police worked back toward him, and he was arrested in August 2014, two months after he shut the sites down. Officers recovered more than 12,000 images and 130 videos from his devices, and he refused for a time to unlock the encrypted files.

He pleaded guilty and on March 17, 2016 was sentenced to fifteen years and six months with a ten-year minimum, the judge calling the conduct unparalleled in his experience. The same kind of cross-border work later caught Matthew Falder, a University of Birmingham geophysicist who blackmailed dozens of people online as “666devil.” Falder admitted 137 offenses and was sentenced in February 2018 to thirty-two years, reduced to twenty-five on appeal that October.