GROSSE POINTE FARMS, Mich. – Cryptocurrency payments helped FBI agents discover that a Grosse Pointe Farms man had 722,000 highly organized child porn files.
Rommel Callos Baltazar, 44, of Grosse Pointe Farms, is accused of receiving and possessing child pornography in a criminal complaint filed July 25, 2024.
Link to cryptocurrency payments
FBI agents said they were investigating a known seller of child pornography when they identified a specific cryptocurrency account.
The account had made three separate payments to accounts linked to that seller: on March 27, 2023, March 31, 2023, and April 3, 2023, officials said.
The payments were for a combined $750.
On April 21, 2023, agents said they received information for the account that linked it to Baltazar, including his birthday, Social Security Number, driver’s license, and address.
That led to a search of his home in Grosse Pointe Farms nearly a year later.
Child porn found at home
Baltazar was the only person at the home when it was searched on April 11, 2024. Agents seized electronic devices, including a laptop connected to an external hard drive.
Officials are still reviewing about three terabytes of data from the external hard drive. So far, they have found only “sexually suggestive or explicit material,” they said.
The images and videos on the hard drive were categorized in hundreds of separate folders. Those folders were titled with the name and age of the person shown in the pictures and videos, in the format “name (age).”
Some of the folders contained sexually explicit pictures and videos of girls.
Officials said some of the videos on the hard drive have been matched by the FBI with content that was sold by the online seller referenced earlier in the complaint.
The creation and last-accessed dates on the content were on April 4, 2024, which is one day after Baltazar made the final cryptocurrency payment to the online seller.
An initial review of the laptop brought up about 690,000 pictures and 32,000 videos, many of which appeared to show girls and young women between the ages of 14 and 19 engaged in sexual acts.
Officials said they also found evidence that Baltazar had visited the online seller’s website 89 times between March 27, 2023, and Oct. 8, 2023. His visits included the “how to buy content” section.
Conclusion
The criminal complaint concludes there’s probable cause that Baltazar received and possessed child pornography.