Fayetteville man pleads guilty to trading child abuse porn on 'Kik' messenger app

Francis Brady was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison.

Officials said the Federal Bureau of Investigations began investigating the man in 2015 when they seized the phone of a child exploitation suspect.

Court documents say Brady used the chat app Kik to discuss sexual acts with children.

Officials were able to track down the man's IP address, and found that he was using Kik from a business with open Wi-Fi that next to a restaurant where he worked.

Brady was a registered sex offender and was previously convicted for taking indecent liberties with a 9-year-old child in 2000, when he was 39.

The email that he used to sign up for Kik was the same email that was on the sex offender registry.

The FBI obtained a search warrant for two of Brady's phones and searched his home in 2017. After the search, the man turned over a computer, memory card and multiple cell phones.

Agents found that Brady had 750 images of child porn on his devices, including 300 images of children under the age of 12.