Nude Photos Of Sex Offender Were Sent To Me

First off, about 3 months ago I started receiving texts from unknown numbers alluding to wanting to meet me.

I don’t give my number out to strangers and I’m not on any dating apps nor have I ever used them, so this contact was very strange. I never responded to any of the texts. Every weekend it would be a different number.

Then I started to get FaceTime calls, which I also never responded to. Then after about two weeks of this happening, I received photos from an unknown number of a male’s genitalia. The text with the photos was a pretty crude way of saying they wanted to get whoever they thought they were texting knocked up.

I wasn’t sure if it was a scam because it was hard for me to believe that a real person would do this. I posted about it on Reddit and people were saying it was probably a scam so I just reported it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center and had someone text the number to leave me alone for good measure.

The person who text them started receiving a bunch of sex ad like scam calls, but I have not received any more calls or texts since then.

Fast forward to today, I have USPS Informed delivery on my previous mailing address still turned on to make sure that none of my mail ends up there, even though I have changed it every where I could. I’m not sure how it works but the mail today was for another person living at the address and the mail forwarding address caught my attention because the address seemed like it was one that I had found was attached to one of the phone numbers that had texted me.

I looked up the address and it was a mobile home park. One of the numbers that text me belonged to someone living at a mobile home. On a hunch, I decided to check the Megan’s Law database just to see if the person was an offender. It turns out that the person who sent me those photos is living at my old address (an apartment) and is a registered sex offender in violation per the Megan’s Law database. The face of the man in the photo in the database matches the photo of the man in the nude photos. I kept digging online and found out that they were also arrested by ICE last year. I have no idea if they were released or not, all I know is the arrest was more than 3 months before I received the texts.

I have many questions, but mainly what are my rights here as far as how he may have gotten my contact information (is it legal if the apartment somehow provided him with it?) and how can I prevent him from contacting me again? How can I stop this from happening to someone else? Could this still be a scam?

If this should be posted somewhere else, let me know.

TLDR: Months ago, I received unsolicited nude photos from an unknown number. I reported the numbers and texts to the Internet Crime Compliant Center and had someone text them to stop contacting me. They stopped contacting me but today I found out that a convicted sex offender is living in my old apartment and the nude photos I was sent are of him. I want to know what I can do to stop him from doing this to someone else or if this could be a scam.

Location: California