WESLACO, Texas (ValleyCentral) — A Weslaco man was sentenced to federal prison after a search warrant revealed a massive sized 300-plus gigabyte account, consisting of mostly child porn, federal documents revealed.
Mark Andrew Casarez was sentenced to more than five years in prison on a charge of activities/material constituting or containing child pornography, records show.
On May 11, 2021, Homeland Security Investigations led Rio Grande Valley Child Exploitation Investigations Task Force was contacted by the Texas Attorney General’s Office with a referral from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
A criminal complaint revealed the referral was from Dropbox, a cloud-based storage application, involving a suspect uploading huge files of child pornography.
Authorities were able to track the IP address to a registered physical address. On Sept. 22, 2021, special agents received a search warrant for the Dropbox account, which contained 22 videos and 165 photos of child pornography.
At 6 a.m. Nov. 9, 2021, authorities say they executed a search warrant in Weslaco, and Casarez was transported to the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office for an interview.
Casarez stated the Dropbox account was his, and that he viewed the videos and photos knowing the images were of minors engaged in sex acts.
In addition, Casarez told special agents he had a Mega account, another storage-based application with more child porn.
“Casarez logged into his Mega account which contained approximately 362 gigabytes/19,000 files,” the complaint stated. “A brief review of this account showed multiple files of child pornography, with victims that appeared to be as young or younger than eight years of age.”
Special agents suspected a majority of the unreviewed files were also child pornography.
For reference, at a low quality of 240 to 320p, 362gb is capable of containing about 1,200 hours of video.
Casarez told agents he had been downloading the files for nearly five years from approximately November 2016 to the summer of 2021.
As part of his sentence, Casarez has been ordered to also serve 10 years of supervised release.
