Authorities: Teen used girl's nude photos for blackmail
BOONE, Iowa — A 15-year-old Iowa student pressed a classmate to exchange nude photos with him, then used the photos to blackmail her into sending more, according to a search warrant application.
The boy uploaded those photos into an online folder where other people could see them, according to a police officer's account. Paste BN is not identifying the boy because he is a juvenile.
Authorities in Boone, Iowa, say their investigation of the naked photos and videos of Boone High School students stored online could take several weeks, officials said.
Teenagers taking and trading nude photos is not unfamiliar territory for investigators in Iowa. But the centralized location of the photos, how they were stored and the number of people with access makes this case different and challenging for investigators.
"It's very data-intensive," assistant Boone County attorney Kailyn Heston said. "It's a sensitive issue, so we're not rushing anything."
The teenager, who was arrested in September and referred to juvenile court on suspicion of extortion, is one of several current and former Boone High School students who could see and control online files containing photos and videos of perhaps dozens of high-school-age girls, authorities have said. The investigation into complaints about the teen led to authorities to uncover files in a Dropbox account "amassed over several years by area high school students," the county attorney said in a news release.
The files could be accessed by more than 100 people, authorities said. Investigators are still working to identify everyone shown in the files and determine who uploaded, downloaded and had access to the photos.
Police agencies and schools around the country have been struggling with the issue of students disseminating nude photos and videos. Four percent of teenagers who own cellphones say they have sent sexually suggestive messages to others, and 15 percent said they have received such messages, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The investigation into the 15-year-old Boone student began after a girl told Principal Kris Byam that she had sent the teen a nude photo of herself after he requested it in a text message in June, Boone school resource officer David Powers wrote in the search warrant application obtained by The Des Moines Register. After the girl first sent a picture, the teen "begged" for more nude photos and for her to help him with schoolwork.
The teen also "demanded" that the girl have sex with him at school or in his van, threatening that he would show people the nude photo if she said no, according to the warrant application. The girl asked him to stop and at one point threatened to kill herself. Their conversations took place over text messages and Snapchat, the application that allows people to send self-deleting photo messages.
After the girl told Byam about her experience, Byam spoke to a person who admitted that he'd seen an online folder with nude photos, the warrant application said.
The Dropbox account where the images were stored has been taken over by investigators and no one can access the files anymore. Investigators want to find out whether the images downloaded or exist anywhere other than the Dropbox files, said Nathaniel McLaren, an Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent who runs the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.