A Kaneohe man entered a guilty plea in federal court Thursday after FBI agents in New York discovered he was using an elaborate online marketplace to traffic in child pornography.
According to a federal criminal complaint, Casey Young allegedly swapped images with pedophiles in an online file-sharing community. Young is charged with one count of distribution of child pornography and faces up to 20 years in federal prison if convicted.
He appeared Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Rom A. Trader and waived his right to prosecution by indictment, consented to prosecution by information, and entered a plea of guilty as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Young will be sentenced at 1:30 p.m. March 28 before Senior U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor.
His attorney, First Assistant Federal Public Defender Craig W. Jerome, did not immediately reply to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser request for comment. Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca A. Perlmutter is prosecuting the case.
An undercover FBI employee got control of an
active Wickr online community account and allegedly found Young by infiltrating the secretive online world of pedophiles.
A moderator of the network would place the interested child pornography trader into the stand-alone vetting room whereby instructions were posted in the room for the interested trader to post a certain number of hard-core child pornography media files, according to the complaint.
If the trader posted the requisite child pornography, this would “seemingly indicate that the interested trader was not a member of law enforcement.”
Should the interested trader post the “appropriate type and amount of material,” that trader would be removed from the vetting room by the moderator and then placed into a “main child pornography trading room.”
Once in the main room, participants would “trade child pornography,” according to the complaint.
Many rooms had save features, and any time a new trader would join the room, the new trader had access to “a large repository of child pornography.”
“Many rooms have thousands of child pornography files saved to the repository,” read an affidavit by an FBI agent.
Beyond the main online child pornography room were several other rooms that branched off from the main room. The other rooms were “delineated by the type of child pornography that the specific room was meant to cater to.”
To gain access to one
of the specific rooms, a child pornography trader would have to post “child pornography matching the room description within the main room, and then a moderator would add them to the specific room.”
An FBI online covert employee saw that “a particular user who went by the username “Crackmonkey-
737,” who is Young, was a member of two themed
networks.
Furthermore, “crackmonkey737 has stated that he is a moderator of his own set of child pornography trading rooms on Wickr that are closely vetted, but which the FBI OCE does not have access,” according to federal court records.
On Jan. 24 Young allegedly shared files in a themed room involving adult men and 10-year-old victims. He allegedly used a virtual private network to disguise his location and IP address.
On March 23 the FBI OCE tried to engage Young in online conversation to capture his IP address but could not. However, federal agents learned he was using an iPhone and were able to trace it.
On Sept. 1, FBI special agents in Honolulu searched Young’s Kaneohe residence and his person.
He was confronted where he worked and volunteered a statement.
“In his statement, among other things, Young admitted that his Wickr username was crackmonkey737, that he used the Wickr application as recently as the previous day, and agents observed that the Wickr application was on YOUNG’s Apple iPhone,” according to the affidavit.
