A Stony Plain man is one of 28 people arrested worldwide in a Norway-led investigation into an online network that investigators say sold access to child sexual abuse material for cryptocurrency.
Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams, known as ALERT, said in a release on July 8 that its Internet Child Exploitation unit arrested Rocco Caterina, 40, at his home in Stony Plain on May 27. He has been charged with possessing child sexual abuse and exploitation material. He was released from custody and is scheduled to appear in court on July 15.
Caterina is the son of former Edmonton city councillor Tony Caterina, ALERT spokesman Mike Tucker confirmed. Tony Caterina served on city council from 2007 to 2021 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor last fall. The allegations against Rocco Caterina have not been tested in court.
Who Tony Caterina is
The connection to Tony Caterina is why the arrest drew wider attention, and ALERT confirmed the relationship through spokesman Mike Tucker.
Tony Caterina was a fixture in Edmonton municipal politics for well over a decade. He was first elected to city council in 2007, representing the northeast, and held his seat through four terms until 2021. During those years he was one of council's more fiscally conservative voices and served stretches as deputy mayor. After leaving council, he ran for mayor in Edmonton's last municipal election in the fall of 2025 but was not successful.
Tony Caterina is not connected to the allegations against his son and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. The charge is against Rocco Caterina alone.
What investigators say happened
According to ALERT, the people charged used cryptocurrency to pay for access to dark web forums that hosted child sexual abuse material. Investigators allege Caterina paid for access to one of these services and obtained the material through it.
The dark web refers to parts of the internet that are not reachable through ordinary search engines and require specific software to access, which offenders use to try to hide their identity and location. Cryptocurrency is often used alongside it because payments are harder to trace than conventional banking. Investigators in this case built their case in part by following that cryptocurrency, using the required method of payment to identify who was accessing the forums.
The international operation behind the arrest
The Alberta arrest was one piece of a much larger investigation. The case, called Operation Torch, was led by the Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service and coordinated across law enforcement agencies in 14 countries.
Those arrests spanned Canada, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Sweden. The 28 suspects range in age from 22 to 54. Investigators seized 460 items, including electronic devices and cryptocurrency wallets.
"We have collaborated closely with law enforcement services in 13 other countries in order to coordinate the arrests of the identified users of the forums using this cryptocurrency as the required method of payment," said police prosecutor Terje Michelsen of the Norwegian NCIS.
The operation remains ongoing, which means additional arrests are possible.
What ALERT and its ICE unit are
ALERT is a provincially funded agency that brings together officers from different police services in Alberta to work on organized and serious crime that crosses jurisdictional lines. Its Internet Child Exploitation unit is the team specifically tasked with investigating the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children in the province.
The unit handles a steady volume of these cases. Earlier in 2024, the same ICE unit charged a Stony Plain school bus driver in a separate online child exploitation case. Investigations of this kind typically begin with a tip or with intelligence shared between agencies, followed by forensic analysis of seized devices, which is often what leads to charges months after an arrest.
What comes next
Rocco Caterina is scheduled to appear in court on July 15. As with any criminal charge, the allegations remain unproven unless and until they are tested in court.
ALERT encourages anyone with information about online child exploitation to contact their local police or to report anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
Sources:
Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT), news release, July 8, 2026
Mike Tucker, ALERT spokesman, confirmation of family connection
Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos/NCIS), statement from police prosecutor Terje Michelsen, July 8, 2026
