European Financial Coalition

Major financial, internet and technology corporations have joined forces with international policing agencies, the European Commission and specialist child protection NGOs to bring a halt to the activities of those who seek to make money from the distribution of child sex abuse images.

Led by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre – the UK’s dedicated policing organisation for protecting children from sexual exploitation – and funded by the European Commission, the new European Financial Coalition (EFC) brings together organisations from across all key sectors to track, disrupt and look to help ultimately confiscate commercial gain made by those who deal in the distribution of some of the worst material imaginable.

VISA Europe, MasterCard, Microsoft, PayPal and the NGO Missing Children Europe assisted by Allen & Overy are amongst the founding members and are joined by ICMEC – the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. On the policing side, Europol are working with officers at the CEOP Centre to deliver European wide policing response supported by the Italian National Police.

The objective of the EFC is to bring together all stakeholder groups engaged in the fight against the commercial distribution of child abuse images in order to facilitate and support pan-European police operations, with cross sector solutions targeting in particular the electronic payment systems that are used to purchase child exploitation and abuse images on the internet.

This will ultimately help to:

• Identify, locate and safeguard victims
• Identify, locate and arrest perpetrators
• Identify, trace and seize the assets of offenders
• Educate, inform and empower key stakeholders to prevent the spread and ultimately disrupt and dismantle this crime once and for all.