Europol has supported the Spanish Guardia Civil in their recent operation Plus Ultra II. The action against offenders in EU Member States was facilitated by Europol through the transfer of information on targets and checking of connections to known online activity. Intelligence packages were distributed on 23 targets within the EU and investigations are ongoing.
The initial notification to the Guardia Civil came from the U.S. National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Europol works closely with NCMEC and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in distributing to date more than 30,000 such notifications to 19 countries in the EU enriched with data from Europol's own databases.
The behavior of the offenders in the cases targeted in Operation Plus Ultra II including organising to make access to child abuse easier among themselves and using security and other measures to conceal their identities and offending behavior is consistent with that being seen by law enforcement. Such behavior has been noted by Europol and its partners in recent strategic products such as the iOCTA 2015, the European Financial Coalition's Strategic Report on Commercial Child Sexual Exploitation and the recent Virtual Global Taskforce Child Sexual Exploitation Environmental Scan 2015
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