Palm Coast Man, 64, Arrested After Detectives Intercept Illegal Peer-To-Peer Child Abuse Downloads

Scott Beverst, a 64-year-old resident of Forest Hill Drive in Palm Coast, is being held at the Flagler County jail on $250,000 bond and 10 charges of possessing child sexual abuse material after authorities intercepted his downloads of lengthy illegal videos through a peer-to-peer sharing service. 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) torrent downloading enables users to share files between users rather than through a central server, though the files don’t originate from a single user. Rather, a downloader accessing a particular torrent file would access the various parts of that file from potentially dozens, hundreds or thousands of others who have the file, as torrent files are broken down into innumerable parts. A tracker server keeps track of which users have which parts. 

Peer-to-peer distribution is a routine form of transmitting data: when Microsoft automatically updates your operating system, it’s using peer-to-peer file-sharing. Video game companies and content delivery networks use the technology, as do academics (who were at the origin of its uses). But peer-to-peer usually makes news because it also lends itself to illegal activity, enabling users (or abusers) to evade copyright laws while downloading music or movies, or laws against child sexual abuse material, known as CSAM. 

But peer-to-peer networking relies on a certain degree of transparency. For a peer (also called a “leecher”) to access and download a file, the peer’s IP address must be visible to the network. The network is public. As such, police may and do monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity. Law enforcement or copyright-enforcement firms will typically join a download using software of their own to log all the IP addresses and timestamps of other users in that particular download, or “swarm.” In criminal cases, police can then subpoena an internet service provider (or ISP) to hand over a user’s data. 

In essence, that’s how Beverst was arrested. The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office was conducting a peer-to-peer investigation last Sept. 19 using its own peer-to-peer file-sharing access. It intercepted a sizable file that led to Beverst’s IP address. (An IP, or internet protocol, address, is a unique identifier associated with every computer connected to a network, whether it’s a desktop, a smartphone or other devices. It can be masked, however, with so-called virtual private networks, or VPNs.)

It isn’t clear how the St. Johns County Sheriff’s detectives knew, or had probable cause to know, that the file was illegal. But given the public nature of the peer-to-peer network, their snooping was no different than “plain sight” discovery–meaning a warrantless observation–of a crack pipe or an illegal gun in a car. 

“As this torrent download was being conducted, SJSO was able to intercept the files as they were being saved by the suspect,” Beverst’s arrest report states. Since the IP address was traced to a Palm Coast house, the investigation was turned over to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, where Detective Joseph O’Barr received a physical copy of the downloaded file. A folder was titled in Russian, which translated to “Masha Babko, Veronica Babko, and others, Siberian Mice.” It contained several videos, each depicting undressed pubescent girls suggestively performing for the camera, some with an adult man. The actual amount of material found is not clear: “Due to the nature of this document as a PC statement,” O’Barr wrote in his charging affidavit, referring to probable cause, “the other files are not going to be described for the sake of brevity.”

O’Barr and members of a task force served a search warrant on Beverst on April 16. He had moved into his parents’ home five days before the download intercept. He has a computer background and familiarity with the “dark web,” he told investigators, allegedly admitting to accessing “subterranean” content.

The investigators asked him about the history of “Siberian Mouse,” a known CSAM series.  Beverst knew the full story, “where it was filmed, the prison sentence the abuser of the child victims got, and even the life [of] the ‘main girl’ afterwards,” the arrest report states. Beverst “was aware she attempted suicide as a result of her abuse, has become an anti sex trafficking advocate and even [knew] her last known country of residence.” Even as he described his likeness for a particular victim in the series, saying it was “in her eyes,” he acknowledged that the other victims “looked dead in their eyes, or like they had rings around them as if they were on drugs or trafficked into this situation.”

Only then Beverst revealed to the investigators the contents of his laptop and hundreds of additional files of abuse and other known series, plus his own “creation” of AI generated images of women and girls, from coworkers to neighbors and associates and, in one case, the child of a deceased ex-girlfriend. He told the investigators he was always chasing a “bigger thrill,” and liked the fact that he was not getting caught but also allegedly feared that, given the chance, he would abuse a child. 

O’Barr arrested him on 10 counts currently charged as third-degree felonies on April 16, but “This case is still active pending additional investigation for further criminal acts by Beverst,” the affidavit states.