An innocent man has served the full 18 months of his prison sentence after police made a typo during their child-luring investigation. While looking for a man going by the alias ‘fus__ro_dah’ on the messaging service Kik (a reference to the Unrelenting Force dragon shout from Skyrim), they requested records for the username ‘fus_ro_dah,’ missing a crucial underscore. Unfortunately, this one-character mistake led them to a Canadian man called Brandon Klayme.
Klayme was arrested in 2020 on child sex abuse charges, and was sentenced in 2024 to over a year in prison. As reported by Ars Technica, the investigation began after a Wisconsin mother found an “inappropriate” photo of a man on her 12-year-old daughter's phone, who she had been talking to through Kik. She reported this to the police, who discovered a further 125 messages between the girl and ‘fus__ro_dah’.
The police requested information about 'fus_ro_dah', and Kik provided them with Klayme’s email address. Google records revealed that the incorrectly identified user was based in Canada, so the case was handed over to Halifax Regional Police. They in turn contacted local internet provider Bell Aliant, who connected the IP...
