What was the largest CSAM bust in 2024?
Executive summary
The largest documented coordinated law enforcement action against online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2024 appears to be INTERPOL’s Operation Orion International, a multi-country South American initiative that ran from May to September and resulted in dozens of arrests and multiple rescues across 12 countries [1]. That operation is distinct from high‑profile domestic arrests—such as a California Highway Patrol probe that uncovered one of the largest known CSAM collections linked to a single suspect in California—but available public reporting does not provide a definitive global ranking to prove a single “largest” bust beyond the specific metrics each agency published [2] [1].
1. Operation Orion International: a region‑wide takedown that dwarfed single‑jurisdiction actions
INTERPOL’s Operation Orion International mobilized 12 South American countries from May through September 2024 to target the production, distribution and possession of CSAM on instant messaging platforms; the effort resulted in at least 144 arrests in Paraguay alone and saw law enforcement recover victims and identify prolific sharing networks, with 20 children reported rescued across participating countries [1]. INTERPOL described the initiative as focused on victim identification and rescue and built on information from national cybercrime units — a model of transnational intelligence sharing that produced scale because it coordinated simultaneous national operations rather than relying on isolated local probes [1].
2. Notable domestic case: an enormous single‑suspect collection in California
Separately, the California Highway Patrol announced in 2024 the arrest of a 53‑year‑old man in Twentynine Palms whose months‑long investigation “uncovered one of the largest known collections of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) linked to a single suspect in California,” highlighting how single‑actor collections can be massive even when they involve only one defendant [2]. The CHP emphasized the investigative work of its Computer Crimes Investigation Unit and cooperation with statewide task forces, underlining that scale can mean either many arrests across borders or very large caches tied to one person [2].
3. The context: record volumes online complicate measuring the “largest” bust
2024 was also the year detection groups reported unprecedented volumes of CSAM and rapid growth of AI‑generated imagery, which complicates any simple metric of the “largest bust”; the Internet Watch Foundation said it acted on content on 291,270 webpages in 2024, an 830% rise from when proactive detection began, and flagged hundreds of actionable AI‑generated images that year [3] [4]. Those detection and takedown figures show the scale of material online but are distinct from arrest counts or seizure sizes, meaning aggregated removal data does not directly equate to a single investigative “bust” [3] [4].
4. Why “largest” is ambiguous: arrests vs. rescues vs. volume seized
Different authorities measure success differently: INTERPOL tallied arrests and rescues across countries [1], CHP characterized the scope by the size of a collection linked to one suspect [2], and IWF and other watchdogs measure webpages removed or AI‑tagged imagery [3] [4]. Because public reports use divergent metrics—number of arrests, number of victims rescued, amount or category of material seized, or pages removed—no single authoritative source in the provided reporting offers a global, apples‑to‑apples ranking that names one operation as the undisputed “largest” worldwide in 2024 [1] [2] [3].
5. Alternative viewpoints and reporting limits
Law enforcement agencies frame large, coordinated operations as successes for public safety and victim recovery, but advocacy and civil‑liberties groups often emphasize prevention, platform accountability, and the need for better cross‑border legal tools to keep pace with technology such as AI; the sources here show both operational results and the rising scale of online material but do not include independent global audits that would resolve which single action was the largest [1] [3] [4]. Reported examples—Operation Orion’s multinational arrests and the CHP’s large single‑suspect collection—are both significant and emblematic of different forms of scale, yet the available reporting cannot definitively declare one as the absolute largest global CSAM bust in 2024 [1] [2] [3].