Apologies for the lack of links, but this has been squeaking out all over the place. Details can be found on Kiwifarms when its up, and some were posted to 8chan.moe a couple days ago. It's a shitshow.
Soyjak was a /b/-tier shitposting site that had a massive dark side. Despite the site often raiding loli boards on other sites and communities to brand lolicons as "pedophiles", it turns out that the admins of the site were running a sophisticated and secretive grooming operation behind the scenes. They would make kid-friendly memes and offer free Robux to entice kids to the site, where the site admins themselves were spamming CP when traffic was up to desensitize the kids to it. Then some were selected and invited into a grooming Discord, where they were pressured and eventually blackmailed into producing CP and cutting themselves. At least one suicide is confirmed but people who knew about it have claimed there were many more that weren't documented. This all got out because of mod chat leaks by a disgruntled member of the pedo group matched up the admins' IP addresses to ones that were all over the logs for CP spam, and people started digging. Come to find out the owner of the site is a gay man in court for child molestation in Tennessee.
They also had raid groups that used abandoned TF2 chat servers to coordinate attacks on streamers, minor e-celebs, and anyone who threatened to expose the group. They sent CP to peoples work emails disguised as spam so it would go unnoticed, and basically "gang-stalked" targets across the Internet. They wouldn't touch the person but would attack any community the target was in whenever the person went there, to make that community become hostile to the target and isolate them. One bragged about "targeting their mental health directly" with this tactic.
There were minor rumbles about all of this back in April, but apparently enough finally got out that it blew up a few days ago and the owner pulled the plug on the site in a panic. He's trying to sell the domain now. Several people in the chan-o-sphere have been noticing a large rise in secretive IRL pedo activity across swaths of the alt-site Internet over the past year, but this is the latest and loudest exposure of it that I'm aware of. Soyjak had been raiding 8chan off and on for months prior to this, notably with some emphasis targeting the GG threads with soyface.jpg and CP spam. All the while claiming that 2D loli art was what they were protesting against.
I'm beginning to think "don't trust anyone who vocally hates anime lolis, because they're guaranteed to be a fucking pedophile" is becoming an iron law. 8chan GG did a quick tally and there's been over 500 such cases just in the last few years, with the infamous Dr. Pizza being just one tiny but well known example.
huh, are there any reason why these servers are used instead of setting up something more hardened?
Nothing for sure, but my personal guess would be that its the equivalent of an outlaw gang holing up in a ghost town. Someplace theoretically in the open so nobody is suspicious of it, but also abandoned and uninteresting so no one pays attention to whats going on there.