I’m a paedo hunter & ‘befriend’ world’s darkest monsters… then snare them using the tiniest clues in their sick videos

IT is a job description that would push anyone to the brink of madness: make ‘friends’ with child abusers and trawl through the most gut-wrenching videos on the internet to bring them to justice.

Yet for Greg Squire, this is the chilling reality of life as an undercover paedophile hunter. Spending 12 hours a day searching for the tiniest clues to unmask faceless monsters, his work has led to some stunning criminal busts – and left the dad-of-two on the verge of suicide and addiction.

Greg Squire has worked for nearly two decades as an undercover paedophile hunterCredit: BBC
The squalid basement of a depraved child abuser who kidnapped a young boy – before the lair was unmasked by Greg and his teamCredit: Social media
Monstrous Dmitry Kopylov was jailed for 19 yearsCredit: 112

Having previously worked as a postman, Greg, from New Hampshire, was delighted to be offered a new role with US Homeland Security in 2007.

But the career move to Boston, Texas, was life changing – sending his mind to the darkest places as the full horrors of what paedophiles were getting up to in hidden, unregulated corners of the internet became clear.

“I wasn’t sure what work would be ahead of me,” Greg tells The Sun in an exclusive interview.

“I applied because when I got out of high school I joined the army, and I really enjoyed the camaraderie of that and I knew that Homeland Security had a very broad range of investigations that were available. 

“I was assigned to the cyber group, where crimes against children are the bulk of what is investigated. But I didn’t really know what world I was going into and just how deep and dark things were going to get.”

In 2008, Greg saw video footage of a child abuse incident that was so depraved, it would remain with him for the rest of his life.

“It really opened my eyes to what child sexual abuse was,” he says.

“It was a Sunday morning and [my] kids had been playing outside. I grabbed my work laptop and opened an email from a suspect and looked at the video attachment.

“I saw a bedroom and a little girl in a large bed with a picture book next to her. A man comes in and starts to read the book to her and, for that 30 seconds, it seems normal.

“And then he undresses her and the abuse starts and the girl… it looks like her soul left. I was ready to murder him.

“What was so twisted to me was the level of betrayal. You take an event where all of us, as parents, have read their child a book and that’s the time for them to really trust and feel safe. And to have him turn that on her…

“I mean, it really bothered me a great amount, and it was the first time that I really tasted that fuel to do something about it. That was definitely a turning point for me.”

Hunting the faceless

Greg’s harrowing undercover work in infiltrating paedo networks on the dark web features in the powerful documentary Storyville: The Darkest Web on BBC Four on Tuesday.

It reveals the incredible lengths specialist units like his cyber crime team go to in order to track down cowardly predators.

Greg recalls how, in his first case that “really took off”, an investigation into a girl called ‘Lucy’ was cracked after his team identified the type of brick work seen the background of a paedophile’s video.

“In January 2014, we discovered a series of photos of a girl named Lucy being sexually abused and having her pictures distributed online,” he says.

“We learned that she had been abused from a younger age, probably seven years old in the beginning and now she was almost 12. Being raped by this man for maybe up to five years is a long time.

We saw the abuse of children getting younger and becoming more violent


Greg Squire

“We were working on this every day for seven, eight months, looking for clues in the background of the photos. After about eight months we were able to identify a piece of furniture which had far more limited sales than other items that we had identified.

“But, even so, there were still around 40,000 people who had purchased it across 29 states in the US. That was a daunting task to whittle down. In the meantime, she was continuing to be abused. So, the race was on.”

The breakthrough came in the exposed brick wall in the room.

“We were talking about how furniture and bedding can change but some things don’t. And that’s when we looked at the bricks,” says Greg.

He showed an image of the wall to the brick industry association in Virginia, who shared it amongst their members throughout the States.

It was identified as a ‘flaming alamo’, made in the late 60s through to the mid-80s by a particular company.

A hatch door carved out of concrete led down to his grim cellarCredit: Social media

Greg was excited when he was told by a member of the ACME brick company in Texas, who had identified it, that because bricks are heavy, they are not going to be transported all across the country. 

“He said that those bricks in the picture didn’t travel more than 50 miles out of the plant where it was made,” says Greg.

“By cross-referencing that with items bought in the house we were able to focus on a very small area of around 40, 50 homes. When we looked at the social media of the people living in these homes, suddenly we saw a picture of Lucy.”

Police converged on the house where Lucy’s mother lived with her boyfriend, a previously convicted sex offender, who was then arrested. 

‘Breeding ground’ for depravity

In 2014, Greg and a handful of police officers around the world joined forces to infiltrate the rapidly increasing number of paedophile networks on the dark web.

“Each site has its own niche,” says Greg. “So, it might be only girls, or only boys. A community is built around it and you quickly find out that there aren’t just ones and twos interested in this, but thousands.

“It becomes a breeding ground for who can be the most shocking person, who can take things to the next level. We saw the abuse of children getting younger and becoming more violent.”

High on the team’s target list was one particular offender, who called himself Twinkle and operated a dark web site called Babyheart. 

“He became not just an administrator but a major contributor. Around 12 or 15 children could be attributed to this one guy,” says Greg.

“He wrote in different languages to disguise his identity. But in one chat, written in English, he used a Portuguese expression – ‘It cost me the eyes of my faith.’ In some pictures we could see Twinkle’s hand, which had a skin condition.”

Russian special forces cut through a steel door and broke a window to enter Kopylov’s lairCredit: Vesti.ru

An investigator in Brazil had arrested a paedophile and found a link on his laptop to a Facebook page in Portugal.

Greg travelled to Portugal to take part in the arrest of Twinkle at his home – a skinny and cowering 25-year-old who was found in bed with two children around five years old. 

“He had been arranging to meet up later that day with another man where they had booked into an Airbnb, both taking children there to have a weekend of abusing all the kids together,” says Greg.

Police arrested the other abuser when he turned up at the location with two children in the back of his car. 

Twinkle said that he could not shut down the Babyheart site himself because another man, named Lubasa, was the ultimate owner of it.

“We knew Lubasa to have up to six different sites under his control with maybe half a million users,” says Greg.

He was eventually tracked down in Brazil, where he was arrested on June 6, 2019.

“On the dark web, Lubasa was the master puppeteer but, in reality, his day life was living in squalor,” says Greg.

The seizure of Lubasa’s servers marked the team’s largest dark web capture ever.

The data unmasked hundreds of thousands of paedophiles worldwide. Many individuals who had been viewing child abuse material were arrested.

All of your ‘friends’ during the day are paedophiles. When that’s over, you close the laptop and look around and it’s just you


Greg Squire

“The perpetrators are becoming younger,” says Greg. “Most are under 30 and often work in IT fields as web developers or software engineers and so are technically savvy in keeping a step ahead.

“In 2007 you would find maybe one or two people working together. Now, you have 400,000 guys working in concert. It’s a community of organised crime, run like a business.

“So, what’s the best way to infiltrate a community? It’s to become one of them. We’ve proved over the years that old-fashioned undercover work yields the best results.”

House of horrors

Greg continues: “One of the worst guys that was not captured after Lubasa’s arrest was a user that went by ‘LBO’ or Lover Boy Only. He was a boy lover who liked things more violent.

“He got the attention of the community in November 2020 when he was making a claim that he had kidnapped a boy and, to prove it, he posted a picture of a seven-year-old blonde-haired boy, clearly in distress.

“I can see his face as clear as day, now. That really made my heart start to race.” 

Knowing that LBO spoke English and Russian, Greg reached out to his contact in Moscow, who said that they had been searching for this missing boy for two months after he had disappeared while returning home from school.

Gordana Vujisic, an analyst for Interpol who speaks Russian, started to build a profile of LBO.

Gordana Vujisic, an analyst for Interpol, helped to unmask the faceless paedophile known as ‘LBO’Credit: BBC

“She came up with three little nuggets of information that were really interesting,” says Greg.

“The first was that he seemed to suffer from schizophrenia. In Russia, people who have been diagnosed with that are entitled to financial compensation every month from the government.

“The other pointer was that he talked quite a bit about his brother’s occupation and the third point was a conversation with another person about his mother being killed in a car accident and the year it occurred.”

After cross checking this information, they came up with a man named Dmitry Kopylov, born in 1994.

Police broke into his house on November 19, 2020, where he was arrested and, to their relief, the boy was found alive. He was soon reunited with his parents, who were seen emotionally cradling him in their arms.

Kopylov was later jailed for 19 years.

Darkest depths

Not surprisingly, Greg’s day-to-day work, mixing online with paedophiles and seeing the most disturbing of images, has had an effect on his mental health.

“I was pushing myself, working 10, 12 hours a day, sometimes getting up at 3am if I thought I might catch somebody online at that time,” he says.

“It is rewarding when you get a result but, meanwhile, you’re kind of losing who you are.

“All of your ‘friends’ during the day are paedophiles. All they do is talk about the most horrific things all day long. When that’s over, you close the laptop and look around and it’s just you.

“Not too long after I got divorced, a lot of things were happening in my head space. The hardest part was admitting it.

“I definitely had a time when alcohol was a bigger part in my life than it should have been. But numbing yourself for a number of hours is not a solution.”

In 2007 you would find maybe one or two [predators] working together. Now, you have 400,000 guys working in concert


Greg Squire

Eventually Greg confided in his sister and his close work friend, and he also got professional help.

“I told them I had bad depression and I think I was ashamed that I had succumbed to that,” he says. “But it was a big turning point.

“I stopped drinking because I was fearful. I’d had suicidal thoughts that I didn’t want to have anymore.

“I didn’t want to hide from the pain. I focussed on getting my head straight and a lot of that was for my kids. I didn’t ever want to be someone who they weren’t proud of.

“Finding balance is something I’ve got better at, but it’s a work in progress. If I am working on my laptop late at night, as soon as I close it, I tell myself that that person has gone. Now it’s time to do something that Greg enjoys.

“I went almost 15 years without taking any time off, which is a long time, but I’ve recently discovered that vacations are actually quite nice!

“But the reality is, these kids don’t have breaks. They don’t have vacations. Their offenders have access to them, and so when you start framing it that way in your head, it’s hard to put yourself ahead of that.

“I think a lot of us undercover officers think that way. We don’t ever want to put ourselves in front of the mission. At the end of the day, if someone has to make a sacrifice, it’s going to be us.”

Storyville: The Darkest Web, a BBC Eye documentary for Storyville, airs on BBC Four on Tuesday 17 February at 10pm. The six-part World Service podcast World of Secrets: The Darkest Web, which also focuses on Greg and his work, is available on BBC Sounds and other platforms.


If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans for free on 116123.


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