Shelley man arrested after child pornography is found on phone

SHELLEY – A Shelley man appeared in court Monday after being arrested for possessing a large amount of child sexual abuse material on his cell phone.

Travis Bell, 45, was charged with ten counts of willfully possessing or accessing child sexually exploitative material.

On March 13, a detective with the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office, who is also on the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, was assigned to a cyber tip from the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

The tip stated that someone with a 208 area code had uploaded sexual images of children between the approximate ages of 9 to 17 years old to an online server. According to the police report, the person had been uploading these images since at least Feb. 2, 2022.

The detective tracked down the phone number and it belonged to Bell, along with an email address that matched his.

When trying to reach Bell, the detective wrote that he did not answer the phone. Court documents say the detective conducted surveillance outside Bell’s home for multiple days, seeing him go in and out of the house often.

On April 24, the detective learned that there were even more images on Bell’s cloud account including sexual photos and videos of children. There were also images of Bell and his family, including videos taken outside his house.

On May. 3, around 8:05 a.m., Shelley Police pulled over Bell in a 2010 white Dodge Ram truck. The detective arrived to speak with him and told Bell he had found child pornography on his cloud account.

Bell reportedly said he had a “pretty good idea” how the images got onto his account. He told the detective that he looked at “regular pornography” and talked about “questionable images” where it “might be difficult to know exactly how old someone is in the image.”

He then told the detective that “people have sent him horrible s*** in the past” and that he “likes amateur pornography.” Bell said that when he receives files from other people, he has to “filter through the images because people will send random things to him that aren’t what he is looking for at all.”

The detective described the images found on the cloud account and Bell responded that he “has seen similar type images of teens like that, online in the past,” court documents say.

When asked about other images, Bell said he “didn’t remember it, but he’s sure there are things like that all over the internet.”

The detective explained that the images were uploaded to the cloud account from his phone, and Bell responded that it “probably was something he downloaded but didn’t know what was on there until he opened the folder.”

Bell was then released as the investigation continued.

A forensic exam of Bell’s electronic devices was conducted in June 2023 and revealed more images and videos of child sexual abuse material, including sexual pictures of children as young as 1-year-old.

The exam also revealed that Bell’s search history showed links to Torrent sites, which are described in the police report as “a method of distributing files over the internet.” The detective also found specific pornography searches for “teen” videos on the phone.

The detective sent the report and felony affidavit to the Bingham County Prosecutor’s Office. The case was filed on July 7, and Bell was arrested and booked into the Bingham County Jail with a bond of $100,000. He posted bond and was released.

He then appeared for an initial appearance on Monday and his preliminary hearing has yet to be scheduled.

If convicted, Bell could face up to 100 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

Though Bell has been charged with these crimes, it does not necessarily mean he committed them. Everyone is presumed innocent until they are proven guilty.