Ex-FBI Agent Discovered To Be A Pedophile

Back in September 2010 an undercover FBI agent was cruising around file sharing sites, which apparently have become a common starting point for law enforcement agencies looking to track down pedophiles, when he stumbled across the files being shared by a user going by the name of ‘pedodad36569’ on the GigaTribe P2P network.

At first the case didn’t look like it would be a difficult one to prosecute as the FBI agent had evidence of hundreds of child pornography images in the person’s shared file folder, and on top of that he had a publicly viewable IP address that allowed the FBI to track him right to his door.

With all this information the FBI had no problem getting and executing a search warrant on the home. Except there one one slight problem. After all the computers were examined and the home owner was questioned there was no child pornography found anywhere. It was then that the police realized that the man who they were questioning had an open wireless router which meant that anyone within close proximity could have been using that as their Internet access point.

Of course this put the investigation back to square one and another visit to GigaTribe to try and find another IP address for this ‘pedodad36569’. However it wasn’t until December 6, 2011 that they finally got a break and a new working IP address for their target; which turned out to be about a block away from the first person the police had investigated.

Before rushing in with there search warrants and getting stung the way they had previously two FBI agents drove past the suspect’s Carmel home on April 30 and noted that there was two separate WiFi networks that were reachable from the property, both of which were unsecured.

In the lead up to the actual search of the Carmel home the police and FBI agents discovered that the property was owned to Donald Sachtleben, a 54 year old ex-FBI agent.

The FBI and the Indiana State Police then executed a warrant on the home on May 11, just minutes after Sachtleben returned home from the Indianapolis airport. According to agents, onsite triage of his computers immediately revealed “approximately 30 image and video files containing child pornography,” generally featuring kids under the age of 12.

via Ars Technica

That goes to show you that you can never know these pedophiles can turn out to be.

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Tags: FBI, investigation, pedophiles

About the Author

Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).