A former charter high school teacher has been charged with soliciting the production of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) using CashApp and Instagram from a female minor in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
The FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force arrested Devonne Keith Brown, 56, on June 2, according to charging documents.
The arrest warrant states that the Washington, D.C., resident allegedly met a girl in person at a Giant grocery store near the victim’s home and engaged in a total of 36 transactions, ranging from $10 to $35, between the suspect and the minor from Feb. 18, 2024 to Sept. 22, 2024.
Brown's attorney, Maria Jacob, did not respond to requests for comment by press time. Brown formerly worked at the IDEA Public Charter high school as a health teacher.
"That individual no longer works at IDEA," a school official told NTD on June 3. "We sent an email out to families. The alleged incident does not involve any IDEA students."
Probable cause, according to the arrest affidavit, began on Nov. 7, 2024, when an employee of Block Inc. reported suspicions of child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Block Inc. operates CashApp, which is a digital wallet and financial services platform.
“The employee reported that a suspected adult’s CashApp account had been reported for 'grooming minors and purchasing child sexual abuse materials,'” the arresting officer stated in the charging documents. “Most of the money transfers identified in the accounts consisted of linear movement of funds sent from the subject to the minors.”
The arrest warrant further alleges that the minor victim (MV) told law enforcement that she sent an adult male nude photographs of herself on Instagram and iMessage conversations after he had sent her images of his genitalia.
“The adult male would send her pictures of nude women and ask MV-1 to recreate the image for him,” the complaint states. “MV-1 stated that she would send videos to the man and he would send money to her. MV-1 reported that the man became weird when he would tell her he was near her and wanted to link up. MV-1 stated that she stopped communicating with him after that happened.”
CashApp and Block Inc. didn't respond to requests for comment by press time.
Meta Platforms said it uses sophisticated technology to proactively identify child exploitation content on its platform—and between January and March 2025, removed more than 6 million pieces of child exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram, over 97 percent of which was found proactively before it was reported.