Welcome back! In Part 4 of Scourge, we pick up in the middle of my dealings with cloud-based data storage company MegaNZ.
Before I could charge him with a crime, I needed to confirm this MegaNZ account belonged to him. Yes, I know. It was on his phone. And anyone with common sense would know this material probably belonged to the guy who carried the phone around and who just tried to have sex with a 14-year-old girl… However, due to the wonders of our criminal justice system, the presence of the application on his phone wasn’t enough to link it directly to him.
He had signed up for an account using an email address connected to a made-up persona and the name on the MegaNZ account didn’t match his name. A defense attorney would argue someone else had put the application on his phone. It was his work phone, after all. And his totally innocent client had no idea gigabytes of child porn were accessible from his phone by the simple click of an icon.
Another issue I had was, technically speaking, he wasn’t in “possession” of the elicit content. It was stored in the cloud, not on his phone. Which meant, although he could access at will, it was not in his physical “possession”. Again, I realize how completely ridiculous this is to anyone with common sense. Welcome to our court system. Home to the most educated and brightest minds in the legal arena.
I had no choice but to try and work with MegaNZ to get the information I needed to prove he was responsible for uploading and sharing the content. I comprised an email that sounded more like a child begging his mom to let him have a sleep over than a Detective requesting information with the weight of the law behind him. After all, I had no leverage here. They could tell me to pound sand or ignore my email altogether. To my surprise, they responded. And their response changed my entire opinion of MegaNZ and how they handle business.
The beginning of their email was no surprise to me.
“Good afternoon, Detective. Unfortunately, as we are a New Zealand based company, we are not obligated to provide any information in response to a United States search warrant or subpoena.”
Dammit, I thought. So much for that idea.
But the rest of the email pleasantly shocked me.
“However, we have zero tolerance for any child abuse material on our platform. Attached you will find all of the information regarding the account you mentioned, to include the data we have access to within the account. This includes shared links. This is all of the information we would provide if we honored your search warrant. Please let us know if you have any questions or we can help in any other way.”
Respect to MegaNZ and to whoever answered my email. This is the collaboration necessary if we’re going to make any progress in eradicating the evil that is child sexual abuse. I was never able to find out who from MegaNZ replied to my email or provided me with the data, but I owe them a beer. You know, the next time I’m in New Zealand, I guess…
Anyway, the information they provided showed me it was, in fact, my suspect’s account. The link he was publicly sharing contained the same content I located on his phone. I verified this by copying the link, going to Internet Explorer on my undercover computer, and simply pasting the link into my browser. It linked directly to the child sexual abuse material with no MegaNZ account required on my end. I was able to download the material directly to my computer.
As if this wasn’t enough, I also located messages between my suspect and other users on the Whisper App. These messages were atrocious. He engaged in theoretical conversations with other pedophiles about grooming techniques and how to get children to trust them. He virtually high-fived another user who said he’d been able to “fuck a 15-year-old”. Our hometown pedophile wanted all the details of their encounter. This included breast size, other descriptors, what sex positions they used, where they were when they had sex, and obviously, he wanted to know if the other user was willing to introduce him to this 15-year-old.
He whined and griped about the difficulty of finding a young enough girl to have sex with in his area. He especially grumbled about us pesky cops getting in the way of a good ole’ fashioned child rape. My suspect was also chatting with various other young girls. I somberly jotted down their usernames, knowing I’d never find them since Whisper is an anonymous application and keeps no personal information about its users.
I also saw his penis. A lot. Like, pictures and pictures of his penis. He absolutely spammed dick pics. He was the Patrick Mahomes of dick pics. Throwing them to anyone and everyone in such creative ways I was slightly impressed. But, unlike Mahomes, they were rarely received in the way he hoped. As an aside, if you have any interest in becoming a child crimes Detective, you will see more penises than you ever thought possible. When I start chatting with a suspect online, it often goes like this:
Me – “Hi, I’m Samantha :)”
Them – “Hi, Samantha. Have a look at MY DICK!!”
Bam! Dick pic. No warmup. No warning. No foreplay. Just a vivid, detailed picture of an undersized micro-penis. Usually at an angle where their engorged belly can peek into the bottom portion of the picture. Large amounts of body hair and all.
Anyway, I collected all of this information, spent days typing reports, and provided it all to the District Attorney’s Office already daydreaming of how the other inmates would treat this guy during his decades in prison. Case closed, right? This child predator would be going to prison for decades and the children of my county would be safe from his disgusting perversion, right? Right, guys!?
Unfortunately, you already know the ending of the story. He received probation. This guy went home to his wife and will already be on the streets finding new ways to download and share videos of small children being raped. If I know anything about these offenders, he’s probably also on a different chat application trying to find another 14-year-old girl for some “car fun.”
Ultimately, the reason he received probation and not decades in prison was… you guessed it… Money. He used his big tech company salary and hired one of the best defense attorneys in the state. He went through my case with a find-tooth comb and tried to pick out any technicality he could find to throw shade and allow this predator to roam free again. If you remember the beginning of this story’s long-winded introduction in Part 1, the defense attorney claimed I intentionally falsified a report and, because of this, he threatened a Brady/Giglio Hearing. This hearing is essentially an accusation against a law enforcement officer before a judge saying the officer intentionally lied and is therefore no longer a credible witness. This precludes him from ever testifying again. Which would essentially render the case impossible to prosecute and the officer unable to investigate anything ever again.
Spoiler alert – I can still testify and none of the accusations stuck. However, it caused irreparable harm to this case and, honestly, to my community.
Check back next week to hear the ending of this story and for a brief sneak peek of future blog posts!
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