Sex offender charged with sending obscene material to detective posing as minor

ST. LOUIS (KMOV) -- A registered sex offender was arrested by the FBI Friday and charged with transferring obscene material to a minor.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Missouri alleges 46-year-old James Wessley Rankin started a conversation with an undercover detective on an anonymous chat site. The detective, working from the San Bernandino Sheriff’s Department in California, was posing as a 14-year-old girl on the site.

Rankin became a registered sex offender in Missouri after he was found guilty of statutory rape in Greene County. He was also found guilty of endangering the welfare of a child and domestic assault in Christian County in 2019.