New York State Police arrested a 32-year-old Cohoes man Thursday after a cyber tip from a national child-safety organization led investigators to search his home and accuse him of possessing child exploitation material. Cody Ashline was taken into custody and charged with possessing a sexual performance by a child, a felony under New York law.
According to WRGB, the investigation began with a cyber tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which state police said prompted them to open the case. Investigators then executed a search warrant at Ashline’s Cohoes residence on Thursday, the outlet reported.
Ashline is accused of possessing images consistent with child sexual exploitation, per the station’s report. He was transported to State Police in Latham, where he was arrested and processed, before being issued an appearance ticket returnable to Cohoes City Court on November 5 and released, the same account notes.
Multiple Agencies Joined the Investigation
The case was not handled by New York State Police alone. Per the same report, troopers were assisted by the Troop G Computer Crimes Unit, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, Homeland Security Investigations and the Cohoes Police Department.
The station reported that Ashline faces a class E felony charge.
Cyber Tips Are Surging Nationally
NCMEC’s CyberTipline, created in 1998 to receive reports of suspected child sexual exploitation from the public and electronic service providers, identified and escalated more than 53,000 reports in 2025 that were urgent or involved a child in imminent danger, according to missingkids.org.
That same data shows reports from electronic service providers contained 61.8 million images, videos and other files tied to child sexual exploitation incidents last year. Reports concerning online enticement reached 1.4 million in 2025, a 158% jump from the prior year, while reports related to child sex trafficking rose 323% over the same period, missingkids.org reported. The organization also logged more than 400,000 reports in 2025 with a generative artificial intelligence nexus.
New York’s own Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force has reported handling a heavy caseload in recent years, receiving over 22,000 cyber tips and supporting more than 4,000 subpoena requests in 2023, according to figures published by troopers.ny.gov. Similar cyber tip investigations have surfaced elsewhere in the region recently; a Binghamton man was separately arrested this week on felony child exploitation charges following a comparable cyber tip probe, as reported by wbng.com.
