A cyber tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children led to the arrest of a UF student this past Thursday.
Officers from the Gainesville Police Department arrested James Major, 21, for 27 counts of possession of child pornography and one count of unlawful use of a two-way communication device.
According to the suspect’s LinkedIn, he was a patient care assistant at Shands, and a biochemistry and psychology major on the pre-med track.
The arrest report says the NCMEC received a cybertip from Google indicating one of its users’ accounts had uploaded and stored 17 videos related to child exploitation from June 26 to June 27. In addition to the cybertip, Google later reported 36 additional cases of child sexual abuse content in the suspect’s Google Drive.
Major claimed he “wasn’t in his right mind” after viewing the content and saved it to his Google Drive, according to the arrest report.
In a GPD news release, Major claimed he did not recognize the email addresses from the cyber tip. He then claimed the account did belong to him, but this was a “one-time incident for illegal content involving prepubescent children.” He also said he had sexually communicated with self-identified minors in the past and was sent nude images of them, according to the news release.
Major reportedly claimed to have received the 17 images reported by Google from Telegram, a messaging app.
Through a series of investigations related to the user’s IP addresses, originally given to the police in the cybertip, police were able to identify the suspect as Major.
The GPD Internet Crimes Against Children division issued a search warrant at Major’s residence on Thursday, where he was arrested.
According to the arrest report, Major told an acquaintance he possessed child sexual abuse material on his device, but deleted some of the content off it. The acquaintance submitted the cyber tip to the NCMEC reporting this information.
According to the arrest report, Major has allegedly been saving pornographic material to Google Drive since 2020.
Contact Sofia Meyers at smeyers@alligator.org. Follow her on X @SofiaMeyer84496
