One of Europe’s top police officers has warned of a sickening online trade in child torture porn.

Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said offenders are using the untraceable online currency Bitcoin to pay for depraved ‘shows’, performed live on webcams, which see young children raped and burned.

He said: ‘The level of depravity seems to be descending year on year, frankly, including what seems to be in vogue now, which is live webcam ‘shows’ of toddlers not just being raped but being burnt with cigarettes.

‘Sorry, but it’s happening online and it’s extremely difficult for us to identify.’

Mr Wainwright warned that Bitcoin — a ‘crypto-currency’ based on mathematical formulae and independent of any government or central bank — is propping up a criminal black market.

He also warned that police and politicians were struggling to keep up with the pace of online crime, thanks to widespread anonymity online, and easy access to encryption technology which can make criminals almost impossible to track down.

Mr Wainwright warned that the principle that everyone’s online activity should be anonymous by default needs to be challenged in order to police the internet effectively.

He criticised the sluggish response from the police, politicians and big businesses, saying that equivalent levels of crime in the physical world would be ‘front page news.’