NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A teacher at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science has been arrested on charges that he coerced teenage boys into taking explicit photographs and sending them to him, the FBI and prosecutors announced Friday.

Agents Friday morning arrested Jon Cruz, 32, an award-winning social studies teacher and a director of speech and debate, at his apartment on East 9th Street in the East Village, 1010 WINS’ Derricke Dennis reported.

He was accused of making child pornography and inducing minors to engage in sexually explicit conduct, CBS2’s Lou Young reported.

In a criminal complaint, the FBI said an investigation had been under way since December, focusing on someone who was paying underage boys to send him nude and lascivious photos over the mobile chat app Kik.

Teacher At Bronx Science Accused Of Paying Underage Boys For Nude Photos

The complaint included detailed and graphic allegations and Kik exchanges between someone the FBI claimed was Cruz, and multiple boys in New York and in New Mexico.

In one instance, Cruz allegedly posed as a teenage boy himself – age 15 or 16 – who made money building robotics and was a nerd who “had a thing for jocks,” the FBI said. He also claimed to one victim that he was a student at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, the FBI said.

Cruz allegedly engaged in chats about sex acts and other explicit subjects with the boys and offered them hundreds of dollars for explicit or suggestive photos of themselves, of their feet or genitals, or of “thumbs-up” selfies, the FBI said. In one instance, he allegedly paid a 15-year-old boy more than $500 in exchange for explicit photos, the FBI alleged.

The FBI allegedly connected the Kik chats and photo trades to Cruz by tracing IP addresses. The FBI alleged that Cruz used a photo of a student who had graduated from Bronx Science last spring for his Kik account, and said the student whose image was allegedly appropriated had been on the debate team at Bronx Science and was Facebook friends with Cruz.