A Ridgefield man is accused of posing as a teenager to befriend a 15-year-old girl through a messaging app and threatening to expose compromising images he received unless she agreed to send additional lewd images.
Joshua Henry Punt, 38, appeared Wednesday in Clark County Superior Court on suspicion of first-degree possessing and dealing in depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, communicating with a minor for immoral purposes and sexual exploitation of a minor.
Judge Scott Collier set Punt’s bail at $200,000. He is set to be arraigned June 5.
The investigation began when the girl and her parents contacted New York State Police and then the FBI’s Albany, N.Y., office regarding online sexual exploitation.
The victim said she met someone she thought was a 17-year-old boy named Jason Lonto through the messaging app Kik on Dec. 3. The individual shared his phone number with her, and they began talking and texting. A few days later, he asked her to send sexual photos and video, and she agreed, according to an affidavit of probable cause.
However, he then demanded more sexually explicit images, and when she refused, he threatened to sell or post the images he already received online, the affidavit says.
In an unrelated investigation in January, an undercover FBI agent began communicating with the same Kik user and discovered he hosted a known child pornography group, where thousands of images were shared. The agent found that the host invited members or banned them from the group if they weren’t posting child pornography, according to court documents. The agent followed the links to cloud storage services and downloaded at least 23 videos depicting boys and girls engaged in sex acts; some were as young as 4 or 5.
The FBI in Albany and Salt Lake City, Utah, subpoenaed subscriber information based on the internet protocol, or IP, addresses assigned to the Kik user, as well as the user’s phone. The resulting records identified the user as Punt. Warrants were served on his Google email account and phone number. Email archives showed he had accounts for the cloud storage services, and a forensic analysis recovered text messages between Punt and the victim, court records state.
A photo Punt sent to the victim seemed to match his general appearance in his Facebook photos. Investigators also found screenshots showing Punt had shared the girl’s images with others on Kik. They listened to threatening voicemail messages he left the girl, and those recordings matched recordings from the Clark County Jail’s phone system from 2013 and 2014, according to the affidavit. Court records show Punt was convicted in 2014 of first-degree criminal impersonation.
Punt was arrested Tuesday. He denied all of the allegations against him and knowing anything about the hundreds of images of child pornography found on his phone, court records say.
