NORTH BAY VILLAGE, Fla. – State law enforcement officials arrested a North Bay Village man after they said a tip from messaging app Kik led them to find videos on his cellphone of preteen girls being raped or otherwise sexually abused.
Authorities with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement took Maciej Rembiszewski into custody on Monday.
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According to an arrest warrant, the investigation into the 30-year-old began on July 26, 2022 after Kik notified the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force of a user uploading child sexual abuse material to the platform.
The uploads were linked to accounts and a phone number associated with Rembiszewski, authorities said.
An electronic search warrant revealed eight files of child sexual abuse material and 22 additional files considered to be “age difficult, child erotica and/or indicative of child sexual exploitation,” the warrant states.
Authorities initially went looking for him at a former residence in Hallandale Beach, but later tracked him down to an apartment building in North Bay Village, located near Treasure Island Elementary School.
They then served a search warrant on March 23.
The warrant states that Rembiszewski told detectives that he “went to an incest chatroom and exchanged porn” but denied intentionally viewing or exchanging child sexual abuse material.
Earlier, he told detectives that his first Kik account had been shut down “two to three weeks after creating it” and said he “did not have any child porn in any of his devices and said once a year he would accidentally walk with his phone in the ocean, or he would lose his phone,” authorities said.
Authorities would later find two videos on Rembiszewski’s iPhone 11: a screen recording from a Telegram chat room showing a “photo collage of videos showing teens and prepubescent female children,” one of whom was as young as 5, and a video of a girl between the ages of 7 and 9 being sexually abused by a man, the warrant states.
The Polish national was arrested on two counts of possession of child sexual abuse material and was being held in Miami-Dade County’s Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $500,000 bond as of Tuesday afternoon.