U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said Wednesday that a man from Hudson County was charged with making child pornography after police said he used a message app to talk to a teenager and send him sexually explicit videos.
Two counts were brought against Julio Albery Nunez, 27, of West New York: one count of sexual abuse of a minor and one count of having child pornography on his person.
He was taken on Monday and is still being held after a detention hearing in federal court in Newark on Tuesday.
Authorities said they started looking into Nunez’s possible role with child pornography on the dark web and other websites in December 2022. Police say that he most recently used a messaging app to pretend to be a young girl in order to talk to a male minor between the ages of 15 and 16.
The federal complaint says Nunez sent the male teen sexually explicit videos of women performing sexual acts through online chats and asked for and got sexually explicit videos of the alleged victim in return.
The complaint also says that Nunez paid for the videos with a mobile payment tool.
The federal lawsuit against Nunez says that on May 20, police searched his home and took two cell phones, a laptop, and an external hard drive.
The complaint said that Nunez told detectives during an interview on the day of the search that he had posted child pornographic material on different websites and the “dark web” under a fake name.
Wednesday, a request for comment from Nunez’s federal public defender did not get a response right away.