A 39-year-old Aurora man is being held without bond at the Aurora Municipal Detention Center after detectives investigated child sexual abuse material shared on the messaging app Kik and searched his residence. Brandon William Cross was arrested on an active warrant on September 3 on charges of sexual exploitation of a child, capping an Aurora Police Department Internet Crimes Against Children investigation that began in 2024.
According to a post from the Aurora Police Dept
, detectives received four CyberTips from Kik in 2024 documenting accounts later associated with Cross sharing child sexual abuse material with other users of the messaging app. Around the same time, both the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations were separately working undercover inside Kik online groups where Cross was allegedly trading the material, and both agencies shared their findings with Aurora investigators, the department says.
Armed with that information, Aurora police served a search warrant at Cross's residence and seized several electronic devices. Detectives say they found numerous child sexual abuse files on the seized devices, evidence that ultimately led to the warrant for his arrest. The Aurora Police Fugitive Unit took Cross into custody in Aurora on September 3, and he remains held without bond, per the department's post.
A Task Force Built for Exactly This Kind of Case
The investigation ran through the Aurora Police Department's Internet Crimes Against Children unit, which is partnered with the Boulder County District Attorney's Office, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and Homeland Security Investigations. Those partnerships feed into the Colorado Cyber Guardian Task Force, which brings together local, state and federal law enforcement agencies across the Denver metro area to focus on child exploitation and child sex trafficking investigations, according to the Aurora Police Dept's post.
That regional task force has a track record of large-scale actions in the area. In November 2020, an international operation announced by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement led to 113 arrests worldwide targeting child sexual abuse material exchanges, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Years earlier, in April 2021, a two-day undercover operation led by the same task force — comprising Aurora police, federal agents and state investigators — resulted in 10 arrests across the metro area targeting online child enticement, per the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
How a Chat App Tip Becomes a Search Warrant
Cross's case follows a pipeline that has become routine in Colorado exploitation investigations. Under federal law, messaging platforms such as Kik transmit reports of suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, according to FindLaw. Those tips then flow to task forces like Colorado Cyber Guardian, which build cases toward physical search warrants and device forensics.
The scale of that pipeline nationally is staggering. In 2024 alone, NCMEC received 20.5 million CyberTipline reports containing nearly 63 million images and videos of suspected child sexual exploitation, per Thorn. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has examined online child exploitation and AI-related reporting. That tip volume gets routed through a national network of 61 coordinated Internet Crimes Against Children task forces representing more than 3,000 federal, state and local agencies funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to the Law Enforcement Cyber Center.
What Colorado Law Says About the Charges
Under Colorado Revised Statutes § 18-6-403, sexual exploitation of a child is a felony, with classifications and penalties varying by the conduct involved; distribution or creation carries a four-to-12-year range, per FindLaw. The statute treats the offense as an extraordinary risk crime subject to enhanced sentencing.
Cross's arrest is the latest in a string of similar cases Aurora's ICAC unit has worked in recent months. In March, Aurora police arrested 41-year-old Vicente Ashly Olvera on child sexual exploitation charges following a cyber tip investigation that also ended in a home search warrant. In April, 60-year-old Aurora resident Roger Leon Estergaard was sentenced in Larimer County District Court to 10 years of probation and up to two years in community corrections following an ICAC investigation into online child luring. That same month, Summit County authorities arrested former resident Khidhr Odom in Aurora on child exploitation charges after local officers helped identify and detain him based on an ICAC tip.
