A 36-year-old Franklin County man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after admitting he produced and distributed child sexual abuse material, with investigators saying the case broke open after a national child-safety organization flagged his activity on the messaging app Kik. Justin E. Faldon pleaded guilty in July to production and distribution of child pornography before his sentencing this week.
According to First Alert 4, the Franklin County Sheriff's Office opened its investigation after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children alerted deputies in December 2024 to uploads and distribution of child sexual abuse material tied to Faldon's Kik account. Investigators determined that Faldon had both produced and possessed the material, and he admitted to distributing it online, the outlet reported.
Chat Groups Focused on Incest and Violence
Records pulled from Kik Messenger reportedly showed that Faldon belonged to multiple chat groups centered on incest, minors and sexual violence, per the same report. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson prosecuted the case, according to the outlet's report.
The case was handled out of St. Louis, Missouri, where Faldon's sentencing this week closed out a prosecution that began with a tip from the national clearinghouse for child exploitation reports nearly two years earlier.
A Tip Line Straining Under Record Volume
Faldon's case is one piece of a much larger and growing problem. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says reports submitted by electronic service providers to its CyberTipline contained 61.8 million images, videos and other files related to suspected child sexual exploitation in 2025 alone. The organization's data shows reports of child sex trafficking jumped 323 percent compared with the prior year, while online enticement reports rose 158 percent.
The CyberTipline also received 1.4 million reports concerning online enticement in 2025, more than 80,000 of them involving sextortion, according to the center's reporting data. NCMEC says it identified and escalated more than 53,000 reports last year that were urgent or involved a child believed to be in imminent danger.
Generative AI Adding a New Layer of Risk
Among the emerging threats NCMEC is tracking is the use of generative artificial intelligence in exploitation cases. The organization received more than 400,000 reports in 2025 tied to a generative AI nexus, including over 182,000 involving the possession or generation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, per its published data.
Faldon's 25-year sentence follows a pattern seen in other recent federal cases involving the production of child sexual abuse material. In a separate case out of Eastern Virginia, a previously convicted sex offender, Brian James Backues, 46, of Portsmouth, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for production of child sexual abuse material, coercion and enticement, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Eastern District of Virginia office.
