I found CSAM on Telegram by accident
Edit: thank you all so much for the comments. I really appreciate how many of you have shared advice here. I’m going to look at solicitors this weekend and try and get an appointment booked in with a criminal law based one next week.
I’m from England I’m really starting to panic about a situation I got myself into a few days ago. There is a creator I like who has an account on fanfix. It’s $10 a month to subscribe to her account, so I wanted to find away around that.
I saw someone on Reddit advertise that he had a telegram account with her content on. I messaged the guy and we spoke over telegram. He wanted a one time $10 payment for access to the server and even let me know there was a sextape on there (I didn’t know this existed). I initially ignored him after he let me know as my initial intention was to get the content for free.
I few days later I got back to him and pay him through PayPal (this also becomes a problem). I get the link to the server and all seems fine as I can see her fanfix content on there. I don’t use PayPal a lot so I just wanted to check the payment again. I looked, and I accidently sent it though as a business payment so now this guy has my full name and address.
The guy started messaging me saying he had other servers if I was interested, I told him I wasn’t really interested and he starting sending me through images of some of the girls. It started off all fine and then one of the pictures was a clearly young girl in a bikini. I felt physically sick and went to report him when I remembered this creep now has my address, so if anything happened there and then, he would most likely know it’s me that reported him and have my location.
I then started to go through the server I paid for, and right at the very bottom where the sextape is, there is a video from the girls mother confirming that she was underage in this video. I didn’t know what to do so I left the server, blocked the guy and deleted my telegram account.
I know I shouldn’t have anything to worry about as for me, my intentions were clear and I had no idea there was underage content involved, but I’m panicking because one, I probably should’ve reported this guy but didn’t know what to do, and two, this will probably look really bad to the police if they investigate this creep.
They will see that I paid this guy to access a server that had CSAM on it. What do I do? I’ve been thinking about this non stop for 4 days since it happened and feel so anxious and sick about the whole situation.
Looking for any sort of tips to either someone I can go to, or if I have anything to worry about since I took the action to block this guy and get out of everything as soon as I knew. Thank you