CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – When Albemarle County Police arrested a Woodbrook Elementary School fifth grade teacher on March 2 on child pornography charges, it was the culmination of an investigation that began with a cyber tip to a national organization.

The Report Act of 2024 requires internet providers to notify a national organization of any possible incidents of “child exploitation activity, or suspected child exploitation activity, including trading, storing, possessing, or distributing child sexual abuse material,” Capt. Stephen Anders told Cville Right Now. “If an agency becomes aware of those things, they are required to report them to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children as a cyber tip. Agencies are not required to proactively look for that stuff, but most of them do because they don’t want that on their platforms for obvious reasons.”

Anders, who works for the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office, runs Virginia’s Southern Division Internet Crimes Against Children task force.

That’s where tips are routed by NCMEC once that organization has determined which cases involve either victims or perpetrators are located in the United States. There are 61 ICAC task forces across the country. Every state has at least one. Virginia has two, Anders’s unit in Bedford and the Northern Virginia ICAC task force, run by the Virginia State Police and based in Fairfax.

The ICAC task forces review the cyber tips and then refer them to local agencies, including police departments and sheriff’s offices.

“It’s really no different than if someone had made a 911 call to their dispatch center,” Anders said of the process. “So, ‘Hey, we see this. This is happening, and it needs to be investigated.’”

 

Rise in cyber tips

The Bedford task force was one of the original 10 launched in 1998, an initiative of the Department of Justice.

When Anders started working as an ICAC investigator in 2008, the office received about 360 cyber tips for the year.

In 2024, the Southern ICAC office – which covers the Albemarle County and Charlottesville area as part of its jurisdiction – received over 10,600 cyber tips. Last year, that number went up to about 23,800, Anders said.

“It’s not necessarily that the rate of offending is increasing. I think, platforms are just getting better at finding what’s been going on,” Anders said. “But certainly as kids get access to mobile devices at younger and younger ages, and are on these platforms or their gaming online, like Roblox or whatever, then they’re just out there more exposed with more opportunities to be approached and solicited or targeted. And the bad guys are going to go where the kids are.”

The trend is the same for the Northern Virginia task force.

First Sgt. Robert Brown is the VSP’s alternate commander for the task force. When he started as an investigator in 2021, Brown said the office, which has a coverage area that includes Culpeper and Orange County, received about 3,500 cyber tips. That number had jumped to about 10,000 in 2024 and about 13,000 last year.

“It is definitely a good a thing that providers are notifying us of what they are seeing on their platform,” Brown told Cville Right Now. “We’ve developed a great communication process, communication rapport, with the with the service providers. They’re able to tell us what they’re seeing. We can provide them feedback on what we are seeing.”

Some examples of child pornography clearly show prepubescent children. But the law in Virginia also includes text and headlines that accompany images and videos and suggest the subject is underage.

 

Role of local law enforcement

After providers send cyber tips to NCMEC and NCMEC filters them to ICAC task forces for review, it usually falls to local police departments and sheriff’s offices to finish the investigation. That includes serving search warrants to physically obtain mobile devices used in the crimes.

In the case of Woodbrook Elementary School fifth grade teacher Nicholas Clark, the Albemarle County Police Department executed a search warrant at his home hours before he was taken into custody at the school. Officers seized a tablet and two laptop computers.

Clark is charged with possessing child pornography and distributing child pornography for uploading two pornographic videos and 12 images that appear to show an underage girl, according to a copy of the search warrant obtained by Cville Right Now.

He is scheduled to appear in Albemarle Circuit Court on Thursday morning for a bond hearing, then again on April 23 for the start of his trial.

Part of the challenge of proving a case like Clark’s is establishing that he was in possession of the devices used to upload the child pornography at the time the images and videos were uploaded.

Social media posts made from the same device a short time of the criminal activity can help establish the suspect was in possession of the device, as can text messages or phone calls.

“The whole purpose of the search warrant at the residence is we’re going to seize devices to do further forensic analysis on them in a digital forensic lab to try to get that information,” Anders said. “They may store their images in other folders or apps on their devices, but we’re also looking for proof of care, custody, and control of the devices.

“We might look at a text message to a family member or coworker, or look at his calendar, or look at other social media apps for activity and interaction with date and time stamps to try to say, ‘Okay, well, 30 seconds before you uploaded this, you texted your wife about stopping at the grocery store to pick up some milk and eggs or a prescription from the pharmacy,” he said.

VSP has a high-tech crimes division that does complex digital forensic investigations. But Brown said, nowadays, most law enforcement professionals are trained to some degree in the type of forensic investigatory skills needed to examine mobile devices.

“Everyone has some sort of portable electronic device nowadays, whether it be a smartphone, laptop, or tablet,” ACPD Detective Michael Schneider told Cville Right Now. “It is extremely important to seize these devices to link a subject to the crime.”

In Albemarle, Schneider said the department has a dedicated digital forensics investigator and an evidence unit, and cybercrime detectives undergo specialized training in the “safe handling of electronic devices and digital forensics.”

 

ICAC cases come from other tips, as well

Cyber tips aren’t the only way cases get on ICAC task forces radars. Parents, teacher or school resource officers can directly report to their local police

In those cases, the agency that receives the report shares it with the ICAC office.

On March 1, the Culpeper Police Department received a tip that a man offered to pay three children cash and “Robux” in exchange for sexually explicit images and videos. Thursday, Angel David Rubio Marin, 20, was arrested by Manassas City Police and charged with seven felony counts of using communications systems to facilitate offenses involving children.

Anders and Brown urge parents to have frank conversations with their children about sexuality and what is and isn’t appropriate, and to remain vigilant about who can connect with their children over computers, mobile devices and gaming systems.

Anders noted that much of the child pornography he encounters is self-produced, sometimes by young people who were “sexting” – texting sexual images to each other – and sometimes by children who were enticed to take the photos and videos by a perpetrator.

He said that viewing pornography can become an addiction, and it’s not uncommon for suspects to express relief when they’re apprehended.

“We interview people and ask about their stuff and they confess to everything,” Anders said. “I’ve had people say, ”Thank God you’re here. I’m so glad I finally got caught. I knew it was wrong. I couldn’t stop,'” Anders said.