{"id":796822,"date":"2026-08-01T05:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T05:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/796822\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T05:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T05:28:11","slug":"tiny-difference-in-username-sent-innocent-man-to-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/796822\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Difference in Username Sent Innocent Man to Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n A barely noticeable discrepancy in a screen name led to a Canadian man serving 18 months in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, reports the CBC<\/a>. Nova Scotia’s Court of Appeal has thrown out the child exploitation conviction of 30-year-old Brandon Klayme after finding investigators targeted the wrong Kik account. The problem: US and Canadian authorities treated “fus_ro_dah” as the source of explicit messages sent in 2018 to a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin, when the actual username was “fus__ro_dah.” The difference being that the second has an extra underscore between “fus” and “ro.” \n <\/p>\n


\n “He should never have been charged, let alone convicted,” the court wrote, per the New York Times<\/a>. Prosecutors agreed. Klayme, who said he stopped using Kik in 2012, only spotted the discrepancy as he and appellate lawyer Zeb Brown re-examined trial evidence. Halifax police, who acted on a lead from Dane County, Wisconsin, say they will review their handling of the case. It’s unclear whether authorities are pursuing the real account holder. Klayme, meanwhile, is considering a civil lawsuit. Gizmodo<\/a> has some questions about all this, including, “what in the name of all that is good and holy happened during the trial?” and “how do you convict a man despite having literally no evidence?” \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A barely noticeable discrepancy in a screen name led to a Canadian man serving 18 months in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":796823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[338116,2434,74,338115],"class_list":["post-796822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-appeals-court","tag-nova-scotia","tag-technology","tag-wrongful-conviction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}