A 32-year-old Ohio man has been charged after a 10-year-old Manitoba girl was lured into sending sexually explicit images and videos, RCMP say.
“The details of this case are disturbing and underscore the real dangers that online predators and those with malicious intent pose to impressionable children and youth,” Cpl. Emmie Clements of the Manitoba Integrated Child Exploitation Unit said at a news conference on Monday.
Police were contacted in December 2025 by a family member of the girl after they found messages with someone who had been posing as a boy in his early teens.
RCMP say a man made contact with the girl on a popular social media platform before shifting to direct text messages with her.
He continued to groom the girl and convinced her to send sexually explicit images and videos of herself, and sent explicit material back, Clements said.
RCMP don’t know how long the two had been communicating and refused to reveal which social media platform was used.
Clements said she doesn’t want to blame the platform, because the blame should be on the behaviour of people with heinous intentions.
Asked if naming the platform might help parents, she said “any social media platforms would be a danger to children.”
“There’s a lot of them that are victimizing children, if not all of them.”
RCMP contacted Homeland Security investigators at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa to help find the suspect.
On Feb. 12, special agents searched a home in Wadsworth, Ohio, and arrested Cortney Arden Wise III, RCMP said.
Police also seized electronic devices and found messages with the girl.
Wise is charged with sexual exploitation of children, receiving images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and possession of child pornography.
He remains in custody in the U.S. while the investigation continues. Law enforcement officials there believe he may have victimized other children, RCMP said.
He is not facing separate charges in Canada, Clements said.
Documents from a February detention hearing for Wise at the U.S. District Court for northern Ohio say he was posing as a 15-year-old boy.
The girl, using her grandmother’s cellphone to play games, created a Snapchat account by providing a false age, the court documents say. The grandmother discovered the messages.
In a Feb. 12 affidavit for an arrest warrant for Wise, a Homeland Security agent who reviewed the messages said the girl — who claimed she was 12 — followed Wise’s demands by posing as he requested and sending multiple sexually explicit images and videos.
The agent testified at the detention hearing that Wise had allegedly done this before.
Law enforcement received tips from parents in two separate incidents, in 2015 and 2024, that Wise had electronically communicated with their children and told them to send nude pictures to him or he would retaliate against them.
Wise was also convicted of telephone harassment in 2016.
“This incident was a terrible reminder of the dangers that lurk on the internet, especially for children and teenagers,” the RCMP’s Clements said.
“We encourage parents and caregivers to educate their children on how to stay safe online and to be watchful over them.”
Lindsay Lobb, the director of support services operations for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, said the organization receives similar reports every single day through its Cybertip.ca site.
Reports related to online luring have risen from 750 in 2020 to more than 3,300 this past year, she said.
“Much of this is attributed to adults being allowed to intersect with children in largely unregulated spaces,” Lobb said.
“Parents are doing their best, but we know that more needs to be done. There needs to be a co-ordinated approach and a shared responsibility to protecting children online.”
Lobb didn’t elaborate on what a co-ordinated approach would entail, but said “long [gone] are the days where we can say to the social media companies, ‘do what you will to create a safe space.’
“They have been allowed to create spaces that are unsafe for children. They’ve been allowed to create those with no regulation and no oversight.”
