Kane County Man Charged With Possessing, Trading Child Porn
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A Kane County man stands charged with trafficking child pornography, after the FBI caught him in an online sting and found that he was keeping a graphic stash of pictures and videos depicting children engaged in sex acts with adults.
The FBI announced Monday that Dennis Houston, 43, of the 3-S-500 block of Bliss Road in unincorporated Sugar Grove, stands charged in federal court with one count of transportation of child pornography.
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On Feb. 29 of this year, an undercover FBI agent in Maryland logged onto a peer-to-peer file-sharing network that used the screen name "pthc," according to a criminal complaint against Houston. "The abbreviation" pthc is often used for "pre-teen hardcore," the complaint said.
Upon logging on, the agent found that a user with the handle "Jackn_wm" was in the same network and was sharing two password-protected files, one of which was also titled "pthc," the complaint said.
Jackn_wm later engaged in a chat with the undercover agent and provided the password "kiddie" for both his folders. Jackn_wm later changed the password, but not before the undercover agent found about 20 child pornography pictures and one video depicting.
The criminal complaint graphically described a series of pictures that showed prepubescent girls engaged in sex acts with adult men and women. The complaint indicated based on one of the filenames that at least one of the children was 6 years old.
The agent traced Jackn_wm's IP address, and traced it back to Houston. He had been using mobile broadband, but the FBI was easily able to trace Houston to the Sugar Grove address.
Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael T. Mason authorized the FBI to search Houston's home. Agents confiscated his computer, and found about 1,300 files of child pornography.
Houston was arrested on Thursday of last week, and upon questioning admitted to agents that he was Jackn_wm and had shared the child porn with the undercover agent.
Houston was being held without bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown as of Monday, and is due for a court appearance on Tuesday.
If convicted, Houston faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison and as much as 20 years.
