The US Justice Department alleges the provider knowingly hosted child sexual abuse material. The seized address now displays an FBI notice, while the department says a customer website linked to the allegations remains hosted.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized virtualine.net, the US Justice Department said on October 27, 2026, in an announcement covered by The Hacker News. Visitors to the hosting provider’s address now see an FBI seizure notice.
The action takes control of one domain—the name people use to reach an internet service—rather than, by itself, shutting down the servers behind it. The Justice Department says a website Virtualine allegedly helped create for a customer identified as Vendor 1 remains hosted by the provider. How many servers or customers were disconnected remains unclear.
Authorities describe Virtualine as a “bulletproof” hosting provider: a business that resists abuse complaints and requests to take websites down. Court documents say it advertised services to criminals on cybercrime forums, and allegedly boasted in June 2025 that it ignored abuse complaints.
Court documents identify Secury, Massgod, Spamhouse, Lanedo and Omegatech as other names used by Virtualine. The Justice Department alleges that, despite advertising a ban on child content, Virtualine knowingly hosted Vendor 1, a forum selling access to sexual images and videos of minors and adults. The forum also promoted paid hacking of victims’ accounts to obtain intimate material without their consent.
Virtualine assigned Vendor 1 an IP address—a numerical internet address—around December 2025. Notices about sexual imagery of minors on that server began arriving in January 2026. Virtualine allegedly continued hosting the customer despite numerous notices from law enforcement agencies, the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and a victim’s attorney.
The Justice Department also alleges Virtualine worked with Vendor 1 to build a new website where customers could upload illicit material and download it after paying. In March 2026, Virtualine advertised an additional protection plan promising to move customers’ criminal infrastructure to an unaffiliated shell company after law-enforcement requests, then reactivate the server, the department says.
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Virtualine’s operator denies knowingly hosting child sexual abuse material. The operator says they acted on cooperation requests concerning such material within 24 hours and ended the relationship with Vendor 1 when they identified prohibited material associated with that customer. They also assured customers that their data was safe.
The Justice Department says Virtualine offered a payment option labelled “BTC [NO-AML]”. Customers paid directly to specific unhosted Bitcoin addresses, rather than through a hosted exchange that could check the payments for illicit funds. The department alleges that some payments came directly from criminal groups and that Virtualine subsequently laundered the money to conceal its origins.
Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis separately said its analysis found that direct payments to Virtualine’s unhosted addresses avoided hosted-exchange compliance checks. Virtualine’s transaction history showed direct exposure to ransomware operators, infrastructure for software that steals information, cybercrime forums, illicit shops, scams and phishing addresses used to trick people into revealing information.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office led the investigation with Germany’s Hessen State Police, police in the Netherlands, the UK National Crime Agency and private-sector partners OverRIPE and Lumen Technologies, the Justice Department said.
In an October 27 analysis, security company Silent Push said Omegatech was not fully offline. Its blocks of internet addresses had very low visibility in the routing system that directs traffic between networks. Silent Push said that typically points to a serious problem on the operator’s side.
Silent Push also documented Virtualine’s open letter on a second domain, virtualine.org, within hours of the seizure. In that letter, the operator said they could rebrand, build a new website and carry on, perhaps within a day or less.
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