TALTY, Texas — A Talty man has been arrested and faces a number of charges related to his alleged usage of Snapchat to garner pornographic images of minors and to solicit sexual encounters.
Among the charges are two counts of aggravated kidnapping and two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, according to Kaufman County jail records.
The criminal investigation against 24-year-old Taylor Blake Craft, who has a last known address in Talty, according to state records, began in Kaufman County on January 24, 2019, when a Rock Hill, Connecticut Police Department detective forwarded the results of a search warrant to the Kaufman County Sheriff's Office Crimes Against Persons Division.
A subsequent search warrant, obtained by inForney.com, states investigators recovered numerous photographs and videos of an underage female victim in Rock Hill which were solicited from a fraudulent Snapchat user account. That Snapchat user account posed as a female to start communicating with the victims.
In the Snapchat conversations, according to the warrant, the fraudulent Snapchat user would request nude or partially clothed photographs or, in some instances, the Snapchat user would ask the underage female victims if they would like to go on date with their "best friend," who the user identified as Taylor.
Investigators determined the fraudulent Snapchat account actually belonged to Craft based on cell phone records and identifying photos on Facebook, which matched photos sent via the Snapchat app to the female victims.
These requests were solicited despite the victims identifying themselves as under the age of 17; some identifying as freshman in high school; and one victim, identified as an 8th grade student, was solicited sexual intercourse, according to the warrant.
The warrant goes on to describe numerous sexually expletive messages which were sent in an attempt to solicit the underage victims.
On February 27, 2019, investigators with the Kaufman County Sheriff's Office and the Texas Rangers met with Craft and later seized his cell phone — the contents of which were subject to a forensic search warrant. Investigators also served a pornographic website with a search warrant for data related to a user account allegedly registered to Craft.
Craft was arrested on March 15, 2019, and booked into the Kaufman County Jail on two counts of aggravated kidnapping, two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, two counts of possession of child pornography, one count of soliciting a minor, two counts of publishing or threatening to publish intimate visual material, and one count of possession with intent to distribute child pornography. He is being held on bonds totaling $1,325,000.
An inForney.com request for an arrest warrant affidavit related to the aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault of a child charges had not been made available at the time of press.
