The Ontario Provincial Police, working with 27 police services across Ontario, has charged 64 people across the province in an online child exploitation investigation dubbed "Project Aquatic."
Police said 34 victims, ranging in age from infancy to 17, were identified, while investigators protected another 30 children from exploitation.
Investigators laid a total of 348 charges related to child pornography or the sexual abuse of children.
OPP Detective Staff Sergeant Tim Brown, who coordinates the provincial strategy to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation online, said officers seized 607 electronic devices.
"Today, electronic devices can accommodate as much as one terabyte of storage. One terabyte can store up to 250,000 photos or 500 hours of video," said Brown. An officer examines each photo and video. "We apprehended a suspect who possessed multiple devices and had hard drives amounting to more than 21 terabytes of data."
Brown called the results of Project Aquatic a call to action for police, governments, and parents.
"These activities are not confined to the dark corners of the internet. Predators go where children go," he warned.
Brown urged parents to supervise their children's online activities, educate their children about online sexual exploitation, and take action by reporting suspicious activity to police and cybertips.ca.
Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Signy Arnason, said her organization operates cybertip.ca, the national tipline to report online sexual exploitation of children, received over 30,000 reports last year. Twenty-three per cent came from residents in Ontario.
In 2017, it launched Project Arachnid, which works to remove harmful images and videos globally. Since then, it's issued 40 million removal requests to 1,500 service providers in over 100 countries.
"We know that the expeditious removal of child sexual abuse material is critical for survivor's healing and to minimize ongoing revictimization," said Arnason.
She said the exploitation can continue years and even decades after their images are shared, especially with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.
"To say it's a nightmare would be an understatement," said Arnason. "Offenders are seeking the tools to take existing child sexual abuse material to create an A.I.-created image. You can only imagine the nightmare for those victims who have a long-standing series, and there's now new abusive imagery of them."
In 2022, the centre identified 2,600 images that were AI-generated. That grew to 3,700 last year, and in one month this year, it earmarked 500.
While Arnason lauded the federal government's Online Harms Bill, calling it "long overdue." However, she said it needs to do more to prevent offenders from re-uploading materials.
"If there's a child sexual abuse image that they've removed previously-- it shouldn't be re-uploaded to the platform, that's one area. We'd like to see that outlined a little bit more," she said.
Police laid charges against the following individuals in London:
* a 52-year-old unidentified male who faces two counts of possession of child pornography and one count of making child pornography available.
* 40-year-old Steven Wiebe is charged with accessing child pornography.
In Windsor:
* 23-year-old Ekamdeep Singh Sidhu faces two counts of possession of child pornography, two counts of accessing child pornography, and two counts of making child pornography available.
* A 16-year-old male youth is charged with two counts of possession of child pornography, one count of accessing child pornography, and two counts of making child pornography available.
* 29-year-old Eric Balik is charged with six counts of possession of child pornography and six counts of making child pornography available.
* 39-year-old Charles Bell faces three counts of possession of child pornography, two counts of accessing child pornography, and two counts of distributing child pornography
In Chatham:
* 33-year-old Shane Deweerd is charged with one count of possession of child pornography, one count of making child pornography available, and one count of accessing child pornography.
* 64-year-old Thomas Gallagher of Fergus is charged with five counts of luring someone under the age of 16 and two counts of making sexually explicit material.
In Corunna:
* A 22-year-old unidentified male is charged with one count of possession of child pornography, two counts of making child pornography, three counts of sexual assault where the victim is under 16, and three counts of sexual interference.
In Wasaga Beach:
* A 70-year-old unidentified male faces two counts of possession of child pornography.