Withdraw credit cards from net paedophiles, MP demands

People who finance the sexual exploitation of children via the internet should have their credit cards withdrawn, according to a backbench Labour MP.

Judy Mallaber, MP for Amber Valley, Derbyshire, has called for people who use a credit card to support internet-based child prostitution or to pay for child abuse images online to have their card cancelled.

Ms Mallaber has called on the government to ensure that credit card companies are notified whenever one of their customers has been found guilty of such an offence.

The MP said: "Child porn images on the internet can only be there in huge numbers because people are paying for them.

"If someone is convicted of downloading child porn images using a credit card, or has used their card to help set up a website, then the courts ought to be required to notify the credit card company. I would expect the company to withdraw the card, and would put pressure on them to do so."

The MP said her proposal would also help to curtail the growing involvement of organised crime in internet paedophilia. She said: "Because of credit cards, men who are not paedophiles are systematically arranging for children to be abused in order to provide new merchandise."

She has tabled parliamentary questions calling for the home secretary, David Blunkett, to estimate the scale of the problem and to set out what action is being taken to curtail it.

More than 1,200 people in the UK have been convicted of paying for child abuse images online using a credit card, but none of them has had their card cancelled, according to the children's charity NCH, which supports the MP's proposal.

The charity internet advisor, John Carr, said: "Not one of these 1,200 has lost their card. Indeed there are reports that some of these offenders have been arrested again for using the same cards to commit similar crimes."

The Association of Payment Clearing Services (APACS), the UK trade association for payments, works with the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors illegal internet content in the UK, to trace pay-per-view child abuse websites and report them to credit card companies.

But an APACS spokeswoman said this work was hampered by a lack of police cooperation. "A credit card can only be withdrawn if we know customers have committed a crime and the police aren't sharing this information," she said.

The Home Office and the UK finance industry are currently considering possible ways to withdraw credit cards from people convicted of using them to finance internet child abuse.

In 2002, US and UK law enforcement agencies identified 6,500 Britons as having used credit cards to download child pornography from the Landslide website based in Texas. In its last month of trading alone the site made $1.6m (?870,000).

A Home Office spokeswoman said the government did not consider court orders to withdraw credit cards from offenders as "the most productive way of countering the purchase of child abuse images".

She said: "The removal of the card used to purchase illegal material would be a relatively simple step. However, it would be an easy matter for an individual to obtain another credit card or indeed use alternative payment mechanisms.

"Banning an individual from using all credit cards and payment mechanisms following the purchase of child abuse images would involve the installation of a costly and labour intensive system, regardless of considerations under the Human Rights Act or issues concerning the rehabilitation of offenders."