BY DAN HILDEBRAN
A Bradford County woman accused of possessing hundreds of pornographic images of children pleaded to one count of possession of child pornography and one count of using a two-way communications device to facilitate a felony.
Andrea Dare Crawford, 48, was sentenced to three years with the Department of Corrections and five years of sex offender probation. As part of a plea agreement, the state dropped 10 additional counts of possession of child pornography.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, an FDLE agent working in the Cyber/High Tech Crimes Unit received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on Oct. 23, 2023.
The tip involved an incident on September 14 and came from the company that provides Verizon with cloud services. The report involved six files, two of which were deemed as child pornography.
The agent wrote that the two pornographic files depicted an adult male engaging in sexual activity with a male child.
The tip included the Verizon Cloud account owner’s phone number, geolocation, and Gmail address, which agents traced to the defendant.
Agents then obtained subpoenas for the defendant’s Verizon subscriber information, Gmail account, and Yahoo email account.
After executing a search warrant of Crawford’s Verizon Cloud account, agents categorized 470 images within the account as child sexual abuse material.
“Several hundred images, videos, documents, and messaging threads were located identifying Andrea Crawford as the owner of the content,” wrote an agent in the affidavit. “At least 10 of the 470 files mentioned above contained child pornography.”
The affidavit also describes smartphone screenshots stored on Crawford’s cloud account in which she appears to be buying or selling images with Bitcoin utilizing an encrypted messaging app like Telegram.
