San Angelo Man Faces 10 Years in Prison for Online Impersonation

A San Angelo man who assumed another local person’s identity on a messaging app to send and receive nude photographs is now facing third-degree felony charges that could land him in prison for up to 10 years.

The charge comes on the heels of a 6-year-old online impersonation law added to the computer crimes section of the Texas Penal Code, which makes it illegal to create a web page anywhere on the internet or on social media using another individual’s name or persona with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten someone else. The law also extends to posting or sending messages through commercial or social media websites under the name or guise of someone else.

Utilizing the name and photo of another local individual, the man created a profile on the social app and sent messages to others posing as the victim. The case is one of only a handful that has landed individuals behind bars in Tom Green County over the past couple of years. This most recent indictment is one of two returned in online media searches for the charge.

Despite the relative rarity of the charges progressing to full criminal prosecution, San Angelo has seen a number of computer crimes over the past two and a half years, with online harassment and online impersonation cases steadily increasing.

Twenty individual cases of online harassment were reported by the San Angelo Police Department between 2013 and April 2015; 15 of those involved online impersonation.

According to the files from each of those cases, suspects utilized a combination of Facebook, Craigslist, Tango, SnapChat, email, Kik, Instagram and text messages to harass, humiliate or seek revenge on the party whose identity they’d appropriated by creating fake profiles and posting statements and ads ranging from insinuations that the victim was homosexual to prostitution and blackmail.

San Angelo Police Detective Jake Russell worked on three of the most recent online impersonation cases and expressed that he feels the issue can be a largely juvenile problem that oftentimes goes unaddressed.

“I am not shocked to see that there are this many,” he said, gesturing to the list of 20 incidents reported over the past two years. “It’s probably happening a lot more, it’s just not getting reported.”

Citing example, Russell described a hypothetical situation in which two 15 year olds sent messages and photos via messenger apps and social media. When one goes too far or does something inappropriate, addressing the issue means involving the parents, which could expose the teens in a way that they’d prefer not to deal with.

“…they run the risk of, ‘Ok, now mom’s going to go through my phone,’” Russell said as example. “The mother or father is going to be able to see what they’re talking about, how they’re talking about it, are they exchanging photographs back and forth, are they naked photographs, are they talking about drugs, are the talking about sex, are they talking about all this other stuff that they don’t want mom and dad to know about.

“Now if mom and dad know about it, they call the police, the police get involved and now they’ve got to deal with the police, they’ve got to deal with mom and dad. ‘I’m going to get grounded. My phone’s going to get taken away. What if somebody finds out?’ So it’s better to say, ‘oops, I’m going to delete that. I’m not going to tell nobody.’ It would surprise me if it hadn’t happened a lot more than that,” Russell concluded.

Out of the 20 cases reported by the police department over the past 2.5 years, only three involved both suspects and victims that were still in their teens. The remainder were carried out by adults harassing and impersonating other adults, with the average age of both victims and suspects lying at 27 years old.

A quarter of those cases were targeted at male victims, in which one or more suspects created fake profiles and advertisements on Facebook, Craigslist and Instagram. The victims in those cases were mostly men in their 30s, and two of the five included insinuation of homosexual activities, while in a third case several individuals conspired to create a Facebook account and claim that the 29-year-old male had been caught molesting his stepsister.

Additionally, half of the 20 reported incidents were born out of a relationship gone sour, involving either an ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend, the new girlfriend against the ex, ex-spouses and one unhappily married couple. Additionally, three cases involved students and the remaining seven the parties were either unknown to each other or their relationship was not determined.

In 2013, the police department reported four cases of harassment/impersonation, while that number nearly tripled in 2014 to 11. As of April 2015, five new cases had been reported.

Following behind by a very narrow margin was online solicitation of a minor. Between 2013 and April 2015, the San Angelo Police Department documented 14 cases of online solicitation of a minor, the vast majority of which occurred in text message transactions and via Craiglist, while some of the suspects employed SnapChat, Facebook and Kik to contact their victims.

The danger of using those apps and messaging services, Russell said, is simply not knowing who you’re talking to.

“Someone says they’re 17, who’s to say that they’re not some 45-year-old guy trying to talk to a 16-year-old girl. Then you have online solicitation of a minor, sexual assault of a child, I mean, you could have people kidnapped, murdered, it could all happen, just because kids don’t pay attention,” the detective said.

All of the victims in the most recent 14 cases were females, with an average age of 14 years old. The oldest victim was a 16-year-old girl. All of the suspects were male, with an average age of 40 years old.  In most instances, the victim and suspect had no prior relationship or contact with one another and were complete strangers.

Six of the nine cases from 2014 were part of a sting conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the SAPD’s Special Operations Section, in which they posted an online ad claiming to be a bored teenager and the men responded by soliciting sex and sending nude photographs.

In the remaining eight cases, the suspects sent nude photos of themselves and requested the victims do the same. One 25-year-old male was reported for using Craigslist to solicit teenage girls to locate him masturbating in public places and sending them pictures of his penis. Another 17-year-old male exchanged nude photos and videos with a 14-year-old girl via SnapChat, Facebook and text message, then threatened send them to other students at their school if she didn’t send more. A third male used a naked photo of the 16-year-old victim to compel her to send more photos of herself with the threat of blasting the first one on Facebook.

“My biggest deal [is] kids don’t need phones,” Russell said. “They don’t. Parents, they have to be observant. If your phone has parental locks on it, if you have a way to kind of dial it down…parents need to stay on top of their kids’ phones. Because some of these kids are out there just having a blast. They might be selling drugs or planning burglaries or other stuff. Kids, they talk through the phone and it’s instant. Not every kid is responsible.”

Russell warned that even if parents monitor their children’s use of cell phones and social media, the amount of information adults put on the internet can be just as foreboding if they are not careful.

“You’ve got some parents that like to take pictures of their kids when they’re in the bath at like 2 [years old] and put that on Facebook or something like that, you’ve got to be careful with stuff like that….if you put it up there—especially if it’s open to the public, it’s in plain view—you can save [the photo], you can do whatever you want,” Russell said. “If a 50-year-old guy is [using it for sexual gratification], then that’s what he’s doing.”

While appropriating images of non-pornographic nature is not illegal, putting an excess of those photos out there could provide a predator with the information he or she needs to advance the solicitation beyond the computer screen.

Pictures of families in front of their houses, next to vehicles before road trips and outside of schools and other frequented facilities provide perfect strangers not only a glimpse into their personal lives, but clues about personal information best kept private.

“It’s dangerous,” Russell said. “It’s very dangerous, because they can narrow down where you’re at and where you’ve been. If you’re going to put pictures out like that, people are going to figure it out. If you take a picture of your house or your car in front of your house and put it on the internet, people can figure it out. I’ve been here 38 years, and if you give me a picture, I can probably find the house. So it’s very, very dangerous.”

Online solicitation of a minor is a third-degree felony punishable by two to 10 years confinement if the victim is over 14 and the intent is to distribute sexually explicit material or communicate in a sexually explicit manner. If the victim is under 14 or the intent is to engage in sexual behavior it is a second-degree felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison.

Online impersonation is a Class A misdemeanor if the suspect uses email, instant message, cell text or similar means that references the identifying information of another, unless it is used to solicit and emergency response, in which it becomes a third-degree felony. If the suspect creates a web page, social media or internet site or posts or sends messages through an internet or social media site, online impersonation is a third-degree felony punishable by two to 10 years in prison.

Computer crimes like online impersonation and online solicitation occur with much greater frequency than most parents expect, detective Russell said, and the only effective measure of prevention is heavy monitoring of children’s activities online.

“Social media is not always a good thing,” he said. “You’ve got Instagram, you’ve got Twitter and all that other stuff: it’s real easy to communicate with people. And once you can communicate with them, you can become anybody you want to.”