An Iowa man was arrested this week after Best Buy workers discovered child pornography on his broken laptop.
Robert Watson, 54, of Des Moines, brought his gravy-soaked laptop into a local Best Buy back in August and asked workers to transfer his files onto his new device, according to police.
That’s when employees with the store’s “Geek Squad” said they found several inappropriate images of underage girls, police said.
“During this file transfer process employees at Best Buy ‘Geek Squad’ observed multiple images they believed contained child pornography,” police said in a complaint. “Once this transfer was complete both computers were collected by Des Moines police as evidence.”
Watson told investigators in an interview that he was the only person who used the password-protected computer, police said. He also described several of the images discovered on the device and admitted to labeling the files as “13 year old” and “14 year old’s,” according to the complaint.
When detectives asked him to explain himself, he said he downloaded the images “to tell other people about them,” according to the complaint.
Best Buy did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment, but a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that its “Geek Squad” discovers suspected pornography on devices nearly 100 times each year.
“They don’t search for the material, but inadvertently discover it in the normal course of repairing a computer,” Best Buy public relations director Paula Baldwin told BuzzFeed. “When we do find what appears to be child pornography, we have a legal obligation to notify law enforcement and we inform our customers of this prior to doing any work. Law enforcement determines a course of action based on the evidence, as they did in this situation.”
Watson was arrested on Tuesday and charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography. He was being held at the Polk County Jail on a bond of $50,000 as of Thursday.
He has not entered a plea and it was unclear if he had retained an attorney.
