A U.S. man has been sentenced to 80 years in prison for producing and receiving child pornography following an international investigation that began in Saskatchewan.
The Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation Unit says it began investigating after receiving information from a southern Saskatchewan RCMP detachment that a young girl was being exploited through a popular social media application.
Investigators identified where the offender was communicating from and the usernames he was using. The information was forwarded to American authorities, who continued to investigate.
The investigation resulted in the arrest of a 40-year-old man in December 2016. Robert Dion Ables of Hutchins, Texas pleaded guilty in March to one count of receiving child pornography and two counts of producing child pornography.
Police say Ables used a popular social media application on his cellphone to initiate contact with young girls.
“During those conversations he convinced these girls to send nude photographs of themselves,” the Saskatchewan ICE Unit said in a news release Wednesday.
“He then coerced the girls to send additional sexually explicit images by threatening to distribute their pictures further on social media.”
