Greg Squires had spent seven years delivering letters as a postman when he decided he needed a drastic change.
He decided to enroll in night school – but little did he know that his quest for something ‘different’ would see him end up working as a special agent at the Department for Homeland Security in Washington, where his days would be spent online, fraternising with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening paedophiles.
Working undercover every day, Greg now comes face-to-face with forums full of offenders discussing their depraved fantasies as they swap horrific images of child abuse.
Traditionally, law enforcement have been able to rely on screen names and IP addresses to track down offenders, but ever since the dark web was opened to the public in 2004, paedophiles have lurked and proliferated in its shadows.
‘They are some of the most advanced criminals on the planet,’ Greg tells Metro over zoom from his home in Portland, Maine.
He admits that when he started the job, he was unprepared for just how dark things would get. ‘In the beginning, we were just trying to feel out the environment, which is a whole ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of people inside an organised crime unit that runs different forums and chat sites.
‘And there’s no currency. Unfortunately, children are the currency. The sexual abuse of kids is what they thrive on.’
After transferring to Maine, where he now lives, Greg works both at home and at the Portland office – where he multitasks across four monitors. His role is to cosy up to offenders, building up a known and trusted online persona to gather information and better understand how they work.
‘To infiltrate a community like this, you have to be involved every single day – including weekends and Christmas Day. Sometimes for four hours, some for 18. To use an analogy – if you’re not on the street, you can’t see crime occurring.
‘You can’t work regular hours. You have to be available. The victims don’t have days off – they live in fear every single day. And it’s our duty to be there watching out for them and doing the best we can,’ he explains.
Greg and his team also take on the horrific job of scouring through hours of video footage, looking for clues that will help them track down offenders. He remembers playing with his kids outside in 2008, while relatively new to the role, before going inside to download an email with a file attached showing a four-minute video of a child being raped.
He was chilled to the bone – it was a moment that changed him.
‘Now I have an unfortunate library of that stuff in my head,’ says Greg, who is sharing his story in the BBC documentary Storyville: The Darkest Web.
It also affected the way he parented, Greg adds. ‘You spend most of your day seeing the worst of people, and then you come home to your children. It added a different perspective to what we allowed the kids to do – things like having access to a phone.
‘I really learned to trust my instinct. I was far less concerned about if I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings [about a sleepover or party], as opposed to listening to my gut. I would rather mildly offend some parent than potentially put my child in a [dangerous] situation. My kids might say I was a little over the top as a dad, but they’re healthy and happy today.’
The role is harrowing and demanding, but Greg and his colleagues have seen some incredible successes, such as in the case of Lucy*.
In 2014, Greg saw images online of a young girl being repeatedly sexually abused. His team had no information about the child’s whereabouts, but knew from the light sockets and electrical outlets that she was likely to be in the US. Her abuser was careful to edit pictures to keep his identity secret, but Greg’s team identified a distinctive furniture set, which they narrowed down to a customer list of 40,000 households.
It was a tough time for the whole team, knowing the girl was being abused for months as they desperately searched for clues to locate her on the videos her abuser shared. But after Greg spotted some exposed brickwork in her bedroom and asked the Brick Industry Association in Virginia for help and managed to identify the precise building material and gave Greg a 50 mile search radius for the address. Using the furniture information, the team whittled the list to 40 or 50 addresses, examined their social media – and found Lucy.
Records showed there was a convicted sex offender living at her address – Lucy’s mother’s boyfriend – the little girl was taken to safety and the suspect taken into custody.
The team discovered that Lucy had been repeatedly raped by the same man for five years from the age of seven. Her abuser was jailed for 70 years.
Last year, Greg met Lucy for the first time. ‘I had spent months looking at her and hoping she was okay throughout the whole investigation, so to see her and hear her voice after being so worried about her was incredible.
‘She’s an amazing young woman – the definition of resilience. I’m honoured to have her a part of my life,’ he says.
Greg and his colleagues have claimed other successes, too. They caught an offender responsible for websites that hosted 400,000 global users and who distributed millions of images and videos of child sexual abuse. Meanwhile, in 2020 they helped rescue a seven-year-old boy who had been abducted in Russia, achieving a 19 year sentence for his kidnapper.
They also secured a 266 year sentence for an offender who ran six websites with half a million members, and another 19 years for a sex offender who was on his way to a picnic to abuse children.
However, over the years, the work took its toll on Greg. After he’d been doing the job for around a decade, he started drinking to numb himself from the traumatic images he was bombarded with and the unsettling company he kept. He struggled to hug people or emotionally connect.
‘It isn’t natural, having to behave that way online every single day. To talk the talk [of paedophiles], to read the messages, to see the images, it’s not healthy,’ says Greg. ‘It’s akin to poison. We can tolerate it for a certain amount of time, and then eventually it gets in your system.’
Eventually, he suffered from burnout, working for 10-12 hours a day, sometimes waking at 3am to go online and track someone down.
He tells the documentary: ‘You push yourself,but meanwhile, you’re losing yourself. All of your “friends” during the day are criminals. All they do is talk about the most horrific things all day long. And when that’s over, you close the laptop, look around and it is just you.
‘It was easy at the time to pick up the glass or bottle… But numbing yourself for a number of hours is not a solution.’
Greg is thankful to his work partner and best friend Special Agent Pete Manning who noticed behaviour changes. Greg eventually admitted to his family that the work had left him depressed and suicidal, and took a short break from work, where he sought therapy, gave up alcohol and found a healthy release in carpentry.
It was enough to ease the pressure of the job and allow Greg to throw himself back into the work – albeit, this time round, with better boundaries.
‘I had to find balance. You can work this job 24 hours a day, but that’s not a recipe for me being the best agent for the kids I’m trying to serve,’ he says.
Despite the personal costs, Greg says he would make all those sacrifices again.
He recalls feeling being ‘ready to murder’ the first time he watched an abuser rape a child, but he has since learned to channel that energy.
‘It’s about continuing to move forward through anger and hatred, as I’ve learned that doesn’t do your heart any good. By harnessing that hatred, the only person that suffers is me,’ Greg explains.
‘I am very mission-focused. I have no need at that point to be aggressive or angry or sad, I just need to get what I need from him to move on to the next bad guy.’
‘Every kid deserves a great childhood. There really is no greater feeling than knowing a child is not going to be scared every day. To know that they won’t be afraid when the door opens or when a car door closes, means everything to us- and worth every moment.’
Storyville: The Darkest Web is a BBC Eye documentary for Storyville, available now on iPlayer. The accompanying six-part World Service podcast World of Secrets: The Darkest Web will be available on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
