Invictus Project update: More expansion on way

ASHEBORO — The Invictus Project is expanding, adding officers from two more jurisdictions as its leadership hopes to move from a reactive posture to a proactive fight against child sexual exploitation.

That update was part of their presentation to the Randolph County Board of Commissioners on June 1, two and a half years since the project began.

Captain Justin Trogdon with the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office said the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office and the Liberty police department have since joined their area of operation.

In two years, they were assigned 1,100 cybertips, made 224 arrests and identified more than 500 victims. They rescued 23 children believed to be in immediate danger.

In October, they conducted Operation Ghost Wire. It led to 23 arrests of people accused of soliciting minors, traveling to meet children for sexual purposes, or possessing or distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), often referred to as child pornography.

Not all the cases originate in Randolph County, but Trogdon said predators will often drive more than an hour to meet a victim.

“You can draw a circle on a map, and that’s the pool of people we’ll be arresting or dealing with,” he explained. “Randolph County being centrally located for the task force just makes sense.”

Combining law enforcement resources

The Invictus Project is a nonprofit that funded a task force of law enforcement, starting with Randolph, Forsyth, Alamance, and Davidson counties in 2024.

Trogdon said when agencies work child exploitation cases on their own, they are limited by time and resources. Invictus has pooled their resources to focus on more at a time. 

Special agents from Homeland Security and the State Bureau of Investigation work alongside local departments. They have a forensic lab and a fulltime intel analyst and forensic analyst.

Ray Dawson, founder of the nonprofit, said it raises money through community support, corporate sponsorships and fundraisers.

“The community wants to be involved,” he said. “They want to stand in that gap.”

That money goes toward equipment and training. Dawson said the Invictus Project has received so many tips, a new server had to be installed to store the information.

Online behavior drives child pornography trends

Trogdon said many exploitation cases begin on social media, especially as websites’ numbers grew during COVID-19 closures. He said during that time, Instagram gained about 790 million new users, Reddit gained 431 million and Discord gained 84 million. Predators have also been known to look for child victims on Twitch, Telegram, Snapchat, YouTube and Roblox.

“We see time and time again interactions generated online,” Trogdon said. “They go through one of these platforms, and they either go into self-production, producing their own sexual material, or they meet up for sexual contact.”

He said right now, the project is working on a Forsyth County case connected to a larger online sextortion group that blackmails young people into giving them money or harming themselves.

New artificial intelligence tools are another concern. Trogdon said predators have begun using the technology to create digital CSAM.

According to the nonprofit Our Rescue, predators may create images based on real CSAM images or alter a photo of a clothed child. They may use the software to “deage” an adult to look more like a child or photoshop a child’s head onto a nude body. They frequently start with images of real children.

In 2025, President Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act. It includes requirements for websites to remove nonconsensual sexual material, including that created with artificial intelligence.

Dawson told commissioners that they want to educate parents on how to use the Internet safely. “We live in an age today where there’s going to be an online presence,” he said. “Absence is not the solution.”

Invictus’ educational materials include books for parents and children about how to avoid predators and avoid oversharing information online.