NAKHON PATHOM – Cyber Police and Nakhon Pathom Police have arrested Mr. Tawan Boonyakate, also known as “M Sai Lon,” the administration who managed over 100 LINE groups with more than 10,000 members, mostly involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM) with Thai and foreign children.
The investigation was conducted by Thailand’s Internet Crimes Against Children Unit of Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau. They discovered an advertisement in which people were enticed to join a secret group that distributed CSAM via the LINE application. A member must pay an initiation fee of 200 baht and an additional 50 baht per month to access the content.
The administrator, identified as Mr. Tawan, is a 30-year-old resident of Samut Sakhon Province who works in a factory in the Pho Kaew area of Sam Phran district, Nakhon Pathom Province. He had a previous conviction in 2017 for a similar offence involving children under the age of 15. The police suspected Mr. Tawan of suffering from “paedophilia.”
After the authorities obtained a search warrant, they raided his home on the morning of January 11, 2024, which led to his arrest.
He admitted that he had been involved in such activities for several years and had worked with others before eventually forming his own secret group. He also had approached several children to produce CSAM, but claimed that no victims had fallen prey to his attempts.
The police seized his two cell phones during the search, both of which contained the LINE application and 119 LINE groups with a total of 17,191 members. The groups shared more than 17,000 CSAM files.
Mr. Tawan was charged with “importing or transferring obscene and publicly accessible computer data into the computer system under the Computer Crime Act, possessing obscene media with children for one’s own sexual exploitation or sexual exploitation of others under the Penal Code Section 281/1, trafficking or by trafficking for distribution, production, possession, import or export or distribution by any means of obscene media with children under the Penal Code Section 287/2.”
