The South Carolina Attorney General's Office, in coordination with the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office, Moncks Corner Police Department, and Homeland Security Investigations, arrested a Berkeley County man on three felony counts of possessing visual depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct—specifically, AI-generated child sexual abuse material—under South Carolina Code 16-15-390(C), enacted in May 2025. Each count carries a penalty of up to ten years' imprisonment. The statute, signed into law as South Carolina's "AI Child Abuse" bill, explicitly criminalises obscene visual representations whether "made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means," including computer-generated images, and applies even when no identifiable real child is depicted, closing a gap that previously hindered state-level prosecution of fully synthetic CSAM.
The Berkeley County arrest—three felony counts under South Carolina's new AI-CSAM statute—demonstrates that law enforcement can now charge possessors after seizure and forensic analysis, but possession charges presume the material has already been created, stored, and often shared. Guardii's real-time anti-CSAM detection within direct messages on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms intercepts AI-generated abuse material at the moment of transmission, blocking delivery to the recipient and alerting the appropriate authority—parent, school, or investigator—before possession is established and while digital evidence of the sender's identity and intent is still fresh. South Carolina's statute arms prosecutors; Guardii, backed by Startmate and operating as a Meta Business Partner, arms parents and schools with the capability to prevent the crime from completing and to escalate to HSI or local agencies with actionable intelligence in real time, turning reactive felony enforcement into proactive interdiction.
