A 46-year-old Antioch man is facing federal firearms charges after Homeland Security Investigations agents searched his home and said they found four guns, including an AR-15 with a 60-round magazine, tucked inside a residence they had targeted over allegations he used cryptocurrency to buy child sexual abuse material on the dark web. Anthony Robinson, who has prior felony convictions for grand theft and gun possession, is barred from possessing firearms of any kind because of that criminal history, according to the criminal complaint.
The case began not with a tip from law enforcement but from Wall Street. Robinhood Inc. flagged Robinson's account and passed along information in 2022 about suspected downloads of child sexual abuse material, according to The Mercury News. That kind of referral is not optional for financial and tech platforms — under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A, companies that gain actual knowledge of apparent child exploitation are legally required to submit CyberTipline reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, according to Garrett Discovery.
Investigators say Robinson used cryptocurrency to purchase the material from a site called My Boys in February, per the criminal complaint detailed in the same report. An undercover agent found evidence that Robinson had downloaded videos involving prepubescent children, and Robinson admitted to bulk downloading pornography and to having encountered child sexual abuse material online before, according to the complaint.
Ghost Guns and an AR-15 Found in the Search
When Homeland Security Investigations agents raided Robinson's home, they say they recovered four guns total, including unserialized weapons and the AR-15 with the extended magazine, per the criminal complaint. Because Robinson is prohibited from possessing firearms due to his prior felony convictions, prosecutors moved quickly to charge him with being a felon in possession of a firearm even as the broader child exploitation investigation continues.
California has some of the toughest rules in the country governing homemade firearms. Assembly Bill 1621, enacted in 2022, made it illegal to manufacture, possess, or transfer unserialized firearm parts or assemble untraceable ghost guns without a state-issued serial number and a background check, according to the Giffords Law Center. Unserialized weapons remain a persistent problem statewide — the California Department of Justice recorded nearly 30,000 unserialized crime guns in its Automated Firearms System between 2023 and 2025, including more than 8,800 logged in 2025 alone.
Federal Prison Exposure and What Happens Next
The felon-in-possession charge alone carries a statutory maximum of up to 15 years in federal prison, a ceiling that Congress raised from 10 years after passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, according to the Federal Register. Separately, federal charges tied to knowingly receiving or purchasing child sexual abuse material carry a mandatory minimum of five years and up to 20 years per count, while simple possession can bring up to 10 years, per the Department of Justice. Prosecutors often move fast on gun charges once illegal weapons turn up during a search, even as forensic examiners continue combing through seized devices for evidence that could support additional federal indictments.
Robinson is currently being held in the Contra Costa jail system and is due for a detention hearing on September 4. Arrestees booked in the county are typically housed at the Martinez Detention Facility, a maximum-security facility run by the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office.
A Case Built on Digital Paper Trails
The investigation illustrates how deeply financial and tech platforms are now woven into child exploitation enforcement. NCMEC's CyberTipline received 20.5 million reports of suspected online child sexual abuse in 2024 alone, containing nearly 63 million digital files referred to federal and local task forces nationwide, according to MissingKids.org. A federal law known as the REPORT Act, enacted in May 2024, extended the mandatory data preservation window for those tips from 90 days to a full year and raised penalties for platforms that fail to report, giving investigators far more time to trace crypto transactions before executing search warrants like the one at Robinson's home.
Homeland Security Investigations conducts these dark web raids under the Department of Justice's Project Safe Childhood initiative, launched in 2006, which pairs federal prosecutors with HSI and regional Internet Crimes Against Children task forces to investigate exploitation networks and execute search warrants. California has long been a focal point for that work on the gun side as well: ATF trace data shows the state accounted for 12% of all national firearm trace requests and 55% of all ghost guns traced nationwide between 2017 and 2021.
