Do Anonymous Web Communications Make for Compelling Evidence?
For every techno-optimist out there, there is someone else who is pondering how much simpler forensic science used to be before the Internet became a ubiquitous presence in the devices that almost every man, woman, and child in developed countries possesses. Remember when you could solve murder cases by testing DNA found at the crime scene or examining bullet casings? Remember when you could solve fraud cases by pointing to allegedly false statements in a document, or when you could cast doubt on allegations of fraud by proving that the letter did not match the defendant’s writing style or, if the defendant wrote the letter, that he or she reasonably believed that its contents were true? On the Internet, reality is a moving target. You can ask a search engine a question, and instead of giving you an itemized list of search results, it can give you an AI generated summary; this summary is a remix of a remix, making it much harder to find out where the chatbot got its erroneous information than it is to sort through the original sources yourself. Almost everything you see is false and manipulative, whether its purpose is to advertise, to inform, or entertain. Worst of all, some crimes take place entirely online, so proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, who is responsible for them requires investigators to navigate a maze of ambiguities, especially when the crimes involve applications that make ambiguity a centerpiece of their brand strategy. Here, our Miami sex crimes defense attorney explains an Internet sex crime case where a messaging app famous for preserving users’ anonymity led to a defendant’s arrest of charges of possession of child sexual abuse content while he had another pending criminal case on unrelated charges.
Nothing Good Ever Happens on Kik
The first rule of marketing is that, if young people want to buy your products, you are going places. The makers of the Kik Messenger app knew that, to be successful, they had to sell what teens want, and what teens want is to communicate online without their parents’ knowledge and to appear cooler and more influential than they are. Therefore, Kik enables users to provide less information when registering than most messaging apps require; it is hard to prove with certainty who the person who signed up for a Kik app is, and it is hard to access someone else’s account, even if you know all the information that the account holder entered when registering. Within a year of its launch, Kik had attracted millions of users, nearly half of them under the age of 18.
Kik originally advertised itself as a music sharing app, but innocent fun on the Internet never stays innocent for very long. Remember when Tik Tok presented itself as an app for sharing joy? It didn’t take long before adults posing as teens and bots posing as teens started sharing and soliciting illegal images of minors. The National Center for Missing and Endangered Children has notified law enforcement of many images of child sexual abuse on Kik, and police departments have followed up with criminal investigations.
This is how the charges against Craig Rogers began. Rogers worked as an elementary school P.E. teacher until his arrest in the spring of 2025. The National Center for Missing and Endangered Children alerted police about illegal images transmitted on Kik, and the police traced the IP address to Rogers’ devices. Kik anonymizes users, but it does not anonymize their devices. Some of the images transmitted from Rogers’ device appeared to show his office at school in the background; this can strengthen the prosecution’s case that Rogers was the one who created or transmitted the images.
Two Cases Against the Same Defendant Can Have Different Outcomes
When police arrested Rogers, 60, in April 2025, he already had a pending criminal case, arising from a dispute with his neighbors in the condominium complex where he lived. It was because of this dispute that he moved from his condo to the extended stay hotel where police arrested him on the Internet sex crimes charges. The charges filed against him before April 2025 were for stalking and making false statements to law enforcement.
Contact Our Criminal Defense Attorneys
A South Florida criminal defense lawyer can help you seek justice and present the best defenses if you were charged with Internet sex crimes, such as possession or distribution of illegal images of minors. Contact Ratzan & Faccidomo in Miami, Florida for a confidential consultation about your case.
Source:
miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article310021090.html
