A mother and her son are among three Ghanaians arrested for producing and selling child sexual exploitation material to an Australian man now on trial in his home country, police have confirmed.
The Ghana Police Service said the suspects worked together to create indecent images and videos of children, including close relatives, and received payments from Australia in exchange for the content.
The breakthrough came in January 2026, when INTERPOL Accra received intelligence from Australian federal authorities and INTERPOL’s Crimes Against Children Unit.
The information showed that an Australian suspect, arrested in 2025, had been receiving abuse materials from facilitators in Ghana.
Further analysis by the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation confirmed that money had been transferred from Australia to individuals in Ghana, specifically to produce new exploitative content involving children also based in Ghana.
Following a formal request from Australian authorities, a joint team from INTERPOL Accra and Ghana’s Child Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Unit launched an operation.
In the Ashanti Region, police arrested two suspects and rescued two children aged between 7 and 13. A third suspect was later arrested in the Bono Region, where two more victims, aged just 6 and 7, were rescued.
“Some of the suspects are close relatives of the victims, including an older brother and a mother,” police said in a statement, underscoring the deeply troubling nature of the case.
All three suspects remain in custody. The rescued children are receiving support from the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit in their respective regions.
The police service warned that child sexual abuse and exploitation are serious crimes under Ghanaian law, carrying penalties of up to 10 years in prison, heavy fines, or both.
Authorities also noted a worrying rise in financially motivated online child exploitation, describing such cases as especially hard to detect due to their covert, transactional nature.
