Ore was a fishing exercise

I am one of those convicted under Operation Ore, and the public doesn't know the half of it.

The police weren't given a list of names of men who had "purchased child pornography with credit cards", the police were given a list of UK credit card holders whose cards had been used to sign up to 2 adult portals owned by Landslide Productions (AVS.COM & KEYZ.COM) which at their peaks had over 5600 websites affiliated to them, of which 12 have subsequently been shown to have possibly contained child pornography. The police in the UK went to magistrates courts and obtained search warrants on the basis that they "had evidence which indicated suspects had purchased child pornography using credit cards". An analogy to this would be if someone set up a scheme where for a fee you could get a card which gave you access to every nightclub in UK for free and the police subsequently obtained the details of all the members of that scheme and went to court to get search warrants for drugs on the basis that drugs were available in some of the nightclubs and so anyone who joined the scheme must be buying drugs.

Once the police had obtained their search warrants, very few of the people convicted under Operation Ore were prosecuted on anything based on the original Landslide Produtions websites, the police used the list as one massive fishing trip. Some were convicted based on the Landslide Productions websites, I met another "Oree" who had actually disposed of the computer he had owned when he was accessing AVS.COM (because the computer had broken down) and had never visited any other porn sites with the computer he owned at the time he was raided, and so the police found no porn of any sort on his computer. He was convicted of making indecent images of a minor on the basis that the police said he had accessed the AVS.COM website and on the front page was a banner ad which contained a category 3 indecent image of a minor, and he must have knowingly or unknowingly downloaded that image when the banner loaded. He was sentenced to a 3 year community rehabilitation order, attendance at a sex offenders therapy group (where I met him) and 5 years on the sex offenders register. It has subsequently been proved in other Operation Ore cases that the banner ad the police convicted this guy on never actually existed on the AVS.COM website.

The majority of the police officers investigating Operation Ore had no knowledge at all of computers or the internet, my case officer for example had never heard of newsgroups and when he tried showing me a video file on CD relating to one of my charges, I had to show him how to access it. Then there was the police "expert witness" from the Hi Tech Crime Unit who swore under oath in court that using a 56K modem and a quad speed non-Burnproof CD writer I had downloaded files from the internet and burned them directly to CD bypassing the hard drive in my computer.