Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists. It’s not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem, experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet. NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines.
Read more : Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, has a child sex abuse problem — and little is being done to stop it.
