A missing character in a username led to an innocent Nova Scotia man being jailed for 18 months. The case began in 2018 with a child-luring investigation in Madison, Wisconsin, which extended to Halifax, Canada. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah”, but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah”.
This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison.
The investigation started when a 12-year-old Wisconsin girl communicated with an adult male through the Kik messaging service from August to December 2018. During a check of the girl’s phone, her mother found an “inappropriate” photo of the male and called local police.
The Dane County Sheriff’s Department responded and ran a forensic search on the phone, identifying 125 Kik messages between the girl and an adult with the username “fus__ro_dah”. To identify this person, the cops contacted Kik, but their subpoena accidentally requested information about the Kik user “fus_ro_dah”.
Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response. Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so the Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax Regional Police. They then took the IP address to local Internet provider Bell Aliant.
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Bell connected the IP address to the physical address of their subscriber, Brandon Klayme. The computer workspace and digital forensics played a key role in the case, but the mistake was not discovered until Klayme was preparing his appeal.
Klayme served the full 18-month prison term but continued to fight his conviction. In preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”
It was a significant mistake.
The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn Klayme’s conviction is a significant step towards rectifying the mistake.