Harrison Man Faces Numerous Felony Charges

A Harrison man has been charged with 80 counts of distributing, possessing or viewing matter depicting explicit conduct involving a child.

Christopher Scott Hafar is being held in the Boone County Jail on a $150,000 bond. The 45-year-old was booked in to the jail on July 21 following an investigation by the Harrison Police Department, following a cyber tip reported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Seventeen images and video recordings had been reported to NCMEC with some of the files using the same name, thus indicating that the recordings were sent multiple times. The reporting of those images originated with MediaLab, Inc., a California-based social media company that operates Kik Messenger, an application primarily used on cell phones that allows users to communicate with other users anonymously.

The target of the criminal investigation used the Kik Messenger name arkansas0269247.

Using databases and publicly available search engines, police discovered that someone with that user name was active on a popular pornography website and had posted more than 120 images on the site of clothed and unclothed subjects whose ages ranged from prepubescent to adult.

Using the website’s recorded IP addresses, investigators traced the online activity back to a cell phone number listed for Hafar. Information acquired by subpoena from Cox Communications identified the IP address as belonging to a family member of Hafar’s.

On June 25, a search warrant was issued to MediaLab for information relating to the arkansas0269247 Kik user name.

Including the 17 recordings reported by NCMEC, a total of 162 images or videos were selected out of more than 860 to contain potential child sexual assault material. At least 80 of the images are believed to be of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct. There were 144 recordings selected for review which contained clothed children.

(Story from KTLO)