VERO BEACH, Fla. — A 37-year-old Vero Beach man was released on bond and fitted with a GPS monitor one day after his arrest on eight charges accusing him of using commercial artificial intelligence “undress” websites to generate more than 140 fake nude images of a woman he once lived next door to, then sending them to her from dozens of spoofed phone numbers.
Peter Solomon Ruma was arrested on a warrant at 11:55 a.m. Sept. 2 at a business on 90th Avenue in Vero Beach and booked into the Indian River County Jail. He faces three counts of generating an altered sexual depiction of a person without consent, three counts of promoting an altered sexual depiction of a person without consent, one count of sexual cyberharassment and one count of stalking by cyberstalking.
Bond was set at $150,000 on each felony count and $50,000 on each misdemeanor count, for a total of $1 million. The case is filed in Indian River County circuit court as 2026-CF-000944. The warrant was signed Sept. 2 by County Judge Nicole D. Menz and approved by Assistant State Attorney David Dodd.
Ruma was read his Miranda rights after being taken into custody and declined to speak with detectives, according to the arrest affidavit.
What detectives say they found on the phone
The 18-page affidavit was sworn by Vero Beach Police Detective Greg Matakaetis, an 18-year law enforcement veteran assigned to investigating crimes involving persons and property.
Matakaetis wrote that he obtained a search warrant for Ruma’s residence on 14th Avenue and executed it Aug. 25. Detectives seized an iPhone 17 Pro from the kitchen counter and a TCL Android phone from a bedroom nightstand, placed both in Faraday bags and obtained two additional warrants to search their contents. The extractions were performed by the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office using Cellebrite forensic software, with Detective Sgt. Matthew Redstone, a court-qualified digital forensics expert in the 19th Judicial Circuit and in federal court for the Southern District of Florida, consulting on the analysis.
According to the affidavit, a folder on the iPhone labeled “nudity” contained more than 140 nude images of a single woman with her face edited onto other bodies. Some of the source photographs were her own images taken from social media and business profile pages, with the clothing digitally removed. Some of the composites depicted her performing sex acts. Others were labeled “overlay” and consisted of cutouts of her edited face prepared for reuse in additional images. The unaltered originals were stored in the same folder.
A second folder labeled “Photo IDs” held at least 11 more altered nude images that had been built into a fake identification card containing the woman’s name, Instagram handle, phone number, height, weight, year of birth, home area and place of work, the affidavit says. Detectives found that card twice, once with its original label and once with the label edited off, along with a screenshot of the online tool generating it from her photographs. The folder also held repeated versions of templates copied from her real business profiles, edited to add statements offering to send nude images.
The detective wrote that Ruma’s browser history included two commercial AI services that strip clothing from uploaded photographs to produce synthetic nude images, along with a template site for building fake pornography profiles, an anonymous image-upload service where posts expire after 24 hours, several photo collage tools, an adult site for creating temporary image-sharing rooms, a reverse phone lookup service and multiple people-search databases.
Account documents recovered from the two AI services showed credits being consumed to generate images of the woman, with a “generation queue” listing additional depictions still pending, according to the affidavit.
Investigators also recovered an account page under a username tied to the phone, dated June 10, 2026, carrying a crude description referring to several women in the writer’s life, including a co-worker and a friend’s girlfriend. A separate image on the phone was headlined as a post about a workplace superior and combined real photographs pulled from business and social media profiles with generated nude composites. A third page combined the Instagram profile of another woman, described in the affidavit as engaged to a former close friend of Ruma’s, with a generated nude image.
Timestamps matched to the messages
The affidavit lays out three instances in which detectives say they tied a message the woman received to a file created on Ruma’s own phone shortly beforehand.
On June 15 at 2:45 a.m., the woman received an altered image from an Oregon area code. Detectives found the unaltered nude base image on Ruma’s iPhone with a creation time of 1:48 a.m. on June 14, and the finished composite with her face on it created at 1:52 a.m., four minutes later and roughly 24 hours before the message arrived.
On Aug. 1 at 11:51 p.m., she received a collage built around an altered wedding photograph of herself. The affidavit says the collage was created on the iPhone at 11:22 p.m. that night, about 29 minutes earlier.
On Aug. 8 at 10:19 p.m., she received an altered image along with a real photograph of herself and her sister and a text asking whether the second woman was her sister. The nude image in that thread was created on the phone at 9:10 p.m., roughly 69 minutes before it was sent.
The affidavit also logs a run of messages and calls to the woman between June 7 and Aug. 18 from at least 14 different numbers spanning area codes in Ontario, Missouri, New York, Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, Illinois and Nevada. The content ranged from short messages asking whether the number had reached her by name to messages claiming she had nude images posted online or was selling them.
Matakaetis wrote that reverse checks through the law enforcement tools LeadsOnline and idiCORE showed the numbers traced back to Voice over Internet Protocol services with no verifiable owner, and that some were spoofed to display numbers belonging to unrelated people, several of them elderly or deceased.
A file that goes back to 2018
The affidavit describes a pattern documented across at least five prior law enforcement reports spanning eight years.
The woman told detectives she and Ruma were backyard neighbors in Vero Beach between roughly 2016 and 2018 and shared a core group of friends. She reported an incident in May 2017 in which she and her partner were woken by their dog barking and she saw a man in a baseball cap running from her window.
After she moved in 2018, she began receiving texts from unknown numbers that were sexual in nature, referenced nude photos of her supposedly being online, named her workplace and contained other personal details. Her sister reported receiving similar messages.
In October 2020, according to the affidavit, she received an unsolicited nude photograph of Ruma sent from his own number in the middle of the night. Weeks later, on Nov. 8 and 9, she received a series of texts from that same number apologizing and asking her to delete it. On the same day she received messages from unknown numbers, one of which stated outright that the number was not the sender’s real one.
A sheriff’s deputy documented the complaint on Nov. 9, 2020 and telephoned Ruma, who said the two had been friendly in the past and agreed to make no further attempts to contact her.
In October 2021, a different woman filed a harassment complaint with Vero Beach police. She reported that she had matched with Ruma on a dating app, never met him in person, and then began receiving spam texts referencing her dating profile photograph. Matakaetis, who took that report, wrote that he located Ruma walking his dog nearby and that Ruma denied knowing the woman or ever having been to the bar where she said she saw him.
In May 2022, the sheriff’s office responded to two more harassment complaints filed the same day by two other women, both of whom described themselves as former acquaintances who had cut off contact with Ruma. According to the affidavit, deputies contacted Ruma about those reports and he admitted sending the texts, apologized and agreed to stop.
A deputy’s body camera recorded an exchange from that period in which Ruma, asked whether a set of Kentucky area code numbers used to send the messages belonged to him, paused and said it was a number he had been using and not his main phone. Told he needed to stop, he answered that he would. Asked how he knew the women, he said from a while ago.
The messages resumed between December 2023 and February 2024, the affidavit says, this time including altered nude photographs of the primary victim. Matakaetis interviewed Ruma at his 14th Avenue home in March 2024. Ruma denied sending the recent messages but volunteered the word “photoshopped” while the detective was describing the altered photographs, according to the affidavit.
The current case opened June 11, 2026, when the woman again contacted Matakaetis. Detectives conducted surveillance on the 14th Avenue address from June through Aug. 19 to confirm Ruma still lived there.
Other witnesses
Detectives interviewed a woman on Aug. 7 who said she had been in a 10-year relationship with a longtime friend of Ruma’s and met him through that circle. She said Ruma began behaving strangely toward the women in the group, and that she started receiving sexual messages from unknown numbers in 2018 referencing nude photos of her online. One of those messages, she said, contained a photograph of her in a bikini on a boat displayed on a computer screen, with a man exposing himself in front of it. The affidavit notes the original photograph was taken on a boat trip Ruma attended.
The same friend told detectives their friendship ended in 2021 after Ruma sent his girlfriend a nude photograph of himself from his own number. He said he had spoken with Ruma’s sister years earlier about the messages, and that she told him Ruma had done the same thing to her. According to the affidavit, Ruma’s family has distanced itself from him and now lives out of state.
Matakaetis also documented that Ruma joined at least a dozen public hobby forums between August 2025 and April 2026, covering subjects from golf and gardening to birds, dogs, boats, photography and movies, posting under his own name, photograph and city of residence. He consulted Detective Chris Sharpeta of the sheriff’s office Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, who described joining large numbers of hobby forums as a common practice among online predators seeking to browse as many public profiles as possible and identify people showing signs of isolation or a need for validation.
The 2007 case
Under a section headed prior criminal history, the 2026 affidavit states that a criminal history check shows Ruma is a convicted felon and that he was arrested in 2007 for sex assault, attempted sexual battery and burglary of an occupied dwelling. Court records obtained by The Space Coast Rocket show how that case was charged and resolved.
Ruma was 18 and living on Reef Road in Vero Beach when Indian River County sheriff’s deputies arrested him just after 2 a.m. on Sept. 18, 2007. According to the arrest affidavit written by Detective Chris Cassinari, deputies responding to a report of a residential burglary in progress arrived to find the male resident restraining Ruma in the living room.
The resident told the detective he had fallen asleep in another room while his girlfriend slept on a mattress in the living room. He woke around 2 a.m., walked toward the kitchen, and found her lying semi-nude with her shorts pulled down to her ankles and Ruma a few feet away attempting to hide, with his own pants pulled down. He grabbed Ruma, struggled with him, and called for his girlfriend to wake up, call 911 and leave the house. He held Ruma until deputies arrived.
The woman told the detective she did not know Ruma, had gone to bed around 9:30 p.m., and woke shortly after 2 a.m. to her boyfriend fighting with him. She said she was exposed from the waist down and did not know how her shorts had been lowered.
Cassinari wrote that he examined the perimeter of the home and found fresh bare footprints outside the rear windows. Ruma was barefoot. The prints led to a garage window showing evidence of a recent attempted forced entry, damage the resident said had occurred that day, with a final print just outside the open garage door. The door leading from the garage into the house was the only unlocked door found and was the probable point of entry. Ruma was read his rights and requested an attorney.
Prosecutors filed four counts in case 2007-CF-001469-A. An attempted sexual battery count and a third-degree burglary count were dropped in November 2007. On July 1, 2009, the state dropped the remaining sexual battery count, charged as attempted sexual battery on a physically helpless victim over the age of 12, and Ruma entered a no contest plea to burglary of a dwelling as a lesser included offense. He was adjudicated guilty on that count and the case was closed before Judge Robert Hawley. Court records show he posted $175,000 in cash bonds on Dec. 18, 2007, three months after his arrest.
That outcome accounts for both statements in the 2026 affidavit. Ruma is a convicted felon by way of the burglary plea, and he is not a registered sex offender because every sexual battery count was dropped or dismissed.
The 2026 affidavit summarizes that history using the notation “victim 12 YOA.” The charge as coded in court records reads “victim over 12, physically helpless,” a statutory element under Florida Statute 794.011 that applies to victims who are asleep or otherwise unable to resist rather than a reference to the victim’s age. Court records reflect that the 2007 victim was an adult. The Space Coast Rocket has asked the Vero Beach Police Department who compiled the criminal history section of the 2026 affidavit and whether the 2009 disposition was reviewed.
The charges and the law
The six felony counts fall under Florida Statute 836.13, which the Legislature expanded in 2025. The statute previously criminalized only promoting an altered sexual depiction of an identifiable person without consent. The current version added separate third-degree felonies for willfully generating such an image and for soliciting one, which is why Ruma faces three generation counts and three promotion counts covering the same three sets of images. Each act is a separate offense under the statute, and each count carries up to five years in prison.
An altered sexual depiction under the statute is any image that, through digital or other modification, depicts a realistic version of an identifiable person with another person’s or computer-generated nude body parts, or engaged in sexual conduct the person did not engage in.
The two misdemeanor counts are sexual cyberharassment under Statute 784.049, which covers publishing or transmitting a sexually explicit image containing a person’s identifying information without consent and with intent to cause substantial emotional distress, and cyberstalking under Statute 784.048. Both are first-degree misdemeanors carrying up to a year in jail.
The individual counts span June 14 through Aug. 8, 2026, with the cyberharassment and stalking counts charged across the full period from June 1 to Aug. 8.
Released on bond a day after arrest
On Sept. 3, one day after the arrest, the court signed a pretrial supervision order releasing Ruma from custody on bond and placing him under the supervision of the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office Pretrial Supervision Program. The order requires him to report to the program immediately upon release, or by 10 a.m. the next business day if released after 4 p.m.
The special conditions include GPS monitoring by worn device, surrender of his passport, a bar on accessing the internet, no contact with any individual named in the warrant affidavit, and an order not to leave the state of Florida. He must report in person or by mobile app to pretrial supervision once a week and notify the program within 24 hours of any change in employment, residence or telephone number. The order permits him to leave the 19th Judicial Circuit for work with no overnight stays, and for medical emergencies with prior notification.
Standard no-contact terms bar him from coming within 50 feet of the victim in any public place, within 500 feet of her home or workplace, or within 100 feet of any vehicle she regularly drives.
Under the standard conditions, his release can be revoked and he can be jailed immediately without a warrant or court order if a judge finds probable cause that he violated any law, failed to report, changed residence or phone number without notice, possessed firearms, weapons or chemical sprays, or breached any special condition.
The victim requested that her identifying information remain confidential under Marsy’s Law, and The Space Coast Rocket is not publishing details that could identify her or the other women referenced in the affidavit.
All defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.
Criminal Defense
Bankruptcy · Evictions
WICKS LAW P.A.
Call or text for
free consult
321-733-2700
Eric Wicks, Esq.
1250 West Eau Gallie Blvd. G
Melbourne, FL 32935
Abogado Wicks habla español
