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A Cumberland County man is in custody this week after investigators found he had downloaded hundreds of files of child pornography onto his phone.

Riley Steven Powley, 19, is charged with 50 counts of possession of child pornography and one count of felony criminal use of a communication device, according to online court dockets.

According to the affidavit filed against Powley on July 9, investigators with the Attorney Generals Child Predator Section received a tip in April 2020 about hundreds of files of child pornography being uploaded to Dropbox account, a cloud storage service. The Dropbox was under the name Riley Powley.

Dropbox provided Powleys information to investigators, who confirmed the suspected activity. According to the affidavit, many of the files included prepubescent boys. Over the course of the next several months, police ordered search warrants for the contents of his accounts which brought up hundreds of files of child pornography.

Eventually, investigators tracked Powley to a home in East Pennsboro Township, where he lived with his parents, according to the affidavit. Powley was the only one home when investigators searched the residence on July 8.

When investigators first asked Powley about his use of cloud storage services like Google Docs and Dropbox, he claimed he only used them for school, according to the affidavit. Investigators then said they were there regarding illegal internet activity and he acknowledged that he knew what they were talking about.

Powley said he first saw child pornography when he was still in middle school and had been downloading it on and off ever since, according to the affidavit.

In 2016, he said his parents caught him downloading child pornography, so he deleted everything he had, according to the affidavit. He would have been at most 4 at the time.

A year later, he started looking for and saving the explicit images again, he told police. Thats when he started using Dropbox, as well as his phones photo gallery.

About a year ago, Powley received a message from Dropbox that his account was disabled because of child pornography, according to the affidavit. He then decided to save the images to his phone gallery with a password protecting the files.

Powley told investigators that he was regularly looking at the images to pleasure himself, and described his preferences for content that was of children only and boys as young as ten, according to the affidavit.

Although Powley admitted to having sexual thoughts about children, he denied ever doing it, according to the affidavit. He said he has had sexual thoughts about children hed seen in public or at work, but reiterated that he had never acted on these thoughts.

Investigators are still going through Powleys phone, where he told them they would find 300 files of child pornography.

Powley was arraigned and placed in Cumberland County Prison on $50,000 monetary bail, which he has been unable to post. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for July 26.

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