Across the encrypted messaging platform Telegram, a sprawling network of hidden underground chat groups has emerged as a dangerous hub for the trade of child sexual abuse material, non-consensual explicit content of local women and children, and coordinated stalking and harassment – and despite years of victim reports, court orders, and promised law enforcement action, the abuse continues to spread unabated.
In interactions documented over three months of independent investigation by the *Sunday Express*, a user going by the alias “David” entered one such group, self-named “Trini-bad”, to peddle his personal archive of exploitative content targeting pre-teen children. David urged members to contact him privately to access graphic images and videos showing young children being sexually exploited, even boasting “I got good stuff” alongside a screenshot of his extensive cache of abusive media. In line with the trading culture that defines these groups, David offered to share 100 images of child rape in exchange for 100 additional abusive files from other users, and refused to move his illegal activity to any other platform, citing the relative anonymity and lax enforcement Telegram provides.
Trini-bad, which currently counts more than 400 members, is just one small node in a far larger network. Some of the largest groups in this ecosystem amass tens of thousands of members, and entry is not open to just anyone: aspiring participants must pay hundreds to thousands of Trinidadian dollars for access, with some operators selling tiered weekly, monthly, and quarterly membership packages. One group administrator quoted in the investigation charges $250 Trinidadian for weekly access to a single specialized group, $750 for monthly access, and $2,400 for a three-month package that grants entry to three separate groups, with payments accepted via bank transfer or prepaid phonecards. Some operators even run segregated groups targeting women of specific ethnic backgrounds, marketed to paying members as exclusive collections of exploitative content.
Inside these groups, abusive media is traded like collectible memorabilia, auctioned off for cash or bartered for additional content. Members openly mock the women and children whose privacy and safety are destroyed, often framing the trade as a casual hobby or a tool to punish former romantic partners. Many joke openly about evading law enforcement, claiming police lack either the knowledge or the will to shut down their operations. While some groups have adopted superficial rules banning overt child sexual abuse content to avoid prosecution, users like David regularly evade these safeguards to share and trade exploitative material targeting minors.
In one 236-member group reviewed by investigators, members were polled on how they would sexually degrade a 13-year-old girl, whose image and identity were posted publicly for the group’s consumption. In other groups, explicit images and videos of women are sold for as little as a $250 prepaid phonecard. Tech consultant Shivam Teelucksingh, who infiltrated multiple groups as a decoy on behalf of the *Sunday Express* in May 2025, described the networks as “objectification engines” in his open-source intelligence report. Victims’ explicit images are posted publicly for the group to rate, with hundreds of comments containing explicit sexual threats and derogatory commentary pinned directly to the posts, creating permanent, localized harassment threads that follow victims across their digital and physical lives. Teelucksingh documented coordinated stalking campaigns, where members share victims’ personal phone numbers, workplace contact information, and family details to encourage widespread anonymous harassment via calls and messages. To evade platform detection and bans, members constantly create, delete, and re-create anonymous burner accounts dedicated to targeting victims, often fabricating damaging false backstories or weaponizing real personal information to destroy victims’ social standing within the anonymous echo chamber of the groups.
The existence of these networks is not a new revelation. Victims have been reporting the groups to the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) for years, and the issue reached the national appellate court in a constitutional lawsuit brought by the Humanitarian Foundation for Positive Social Change (HFPSC) on behalf of abuse survivors. In that case, an anonymous survivor reported that explicit images of her taken when she was a child were uploaded to a pornographic site in 2020, leading to years of harassment, stalking, and blackmail. She reported the abuse to local police that year, but no action was taken. In 2021, she infiltrated multiple underground groups to gather evidence, ultimately turning over a flash drive containing links and evidence of abuse against hundreds of additional victims to law enforcement – only for police to later report that the evidence had been lost. The court ultimately ruled that police had failed to protect the survivor, awarding her $100,000 in damages, noting that her report had fallen “into a black hole” with no effective investigation between 2020 and 2022. The court did acknowledge that the TTPS had made limited efforts to address the issue after the case received media attention, and dismissed broader claims of ongoing constitutional breach.
In court filings, police reported that investigations into reports filed after April 2022 are ongoing, and that a TTPS sergeant conducted an investigation between May and July 2023 in coordination with the Director of Public Prosecutions’ Office. Law enforcement has cited significant challenges to infiltrating the private groups, noting that investigators must be invited by group administrators to gain access. A female officer was assigned to infiltrate the networks, but as of the court judgment, she was still waiting for secure covert phone numbers to proceed with the investigation. The TTPS also told the court it requires additional resources – including dedicated devices, virtual private networks, and secure anonymous online identities – to effectively infiltrate and investigate the groups, and noted that officers require ongoing updated training to keep pace with evolving digital evasion tactics used by group members.
Nearly five years after the first reported victim complaint, and months after the court ruling, little has changed. Three months ago, the *Sunday Express* filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the TTPS Legal Department seeking updates on the status of ongoing investigations into the networks. More than 100 days later, that request has not been fulfilled. For victims, the delay stretches far longer. In an April 2025 email to the TTPS, one survivor requesting an update on her case wrote that repeated delays and constant referral between different officers have been emotionally devastating, noting “This constant run-around is not the right procedure. It has also been very emotionally tasking for me as these are sexual offences.” As of the *Sunday Express* investigation, that survivor had still received no response from police. Other survivors shared similar accounts of frustration, with one noting “I’ve reached out several times in the past, and they can’t even point me in the direction of who’s looking into it.” Another said, “I think something in me kind of retreated because I really tried my best to have something done.”