A federal judge sentenced a Catonsville man to 15 years in prison Thursday for possession of child pornography.
August Candeloro III, 35, a registered sex offender, also received a term of lifetime supervised release. He pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography in June 2022 after he was arrested in May 2021.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Erek L. Barron said in a statement that federal authorities seized Candeloro’s cellphone in 2019 and found it contained 2,000 images of child pornography. Candeloro used the social media messaging app Kik to upload and share images under the accounts “oopsman223″ and “myselfcrazy33.”
Candeloro pleaded guilty to sending images of child pornography on the app and joining private chat groups to trade images to people in other states or countries. He posted links to a secure cloud storage platform with encrypted files in many of the chatrooms, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Candeloro previously was registered as a sex offender after he was convicted in two cases of second-degree sex offense involving a 13-year-old victim in Howard and Baltimore counties. He received four years, suspended all but two months, and five years of supervised probation.