A Charlotte County man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for numerous child pornography charges.
Charlotte County deputies were notified in December 2020 by the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children about a cyber tip from Verizon about 29-year-old Matthew Cade.
According to the State Attorney's Office, the tip was about possible child pornography images on Cade's account.
NCEMC officials were able to find the child sexual abuse material uploaded to a cloud server.
CCSO investigators then got a search warrant for Cade's phone and did a forensic download.
According to the news release, more than 300 videos of child sexual abuse material were found on the phone.
Some of the videos had children in them who appeared to be as young as 6 years old and engaged in sexual acts.
The State Attorney's Office said Cade was also engaging in a video chat roulette on the app Omegle, which allows people to talk to strangers via video.
Investigators discovered Cade had live chats with children and directed them to perform various sex acts.
According to the news release, he also chatted with adults and asked them to show him child pornography as he performed lewd acts on himself on video.
All the video interactions via Omegle were on his phone and Cade confessed to recording them so he could watch them later, according to the State Attorney's Office.
Cade was found guilty of 20 counts of child pornography possession, one count of transmission of material harmful to a minor and one count of use of a child in a sexual performance.
He made an open plea to the court. Officials said defendants have the right to plea to the court for sentencing by the judge and give up their right to a jury trial.
This is not a plea agreement, the State Attorney's Office said.
After his 25-year prison sentence, Cade will serve 10 years of sex offender probation.