A Virginia father got more than he bargained for when he bought a handheld video game system for his son a few days before Christmas. According to an article recently published by the New York Daily News, Tom Mayhew, a resident of Hampton, Virginia, is going to have to explain a few things to his son, who found pornographic images on the handheld game console in the wake of the holiday season.

The story was first reported by a Hampton-based television station called WAVY. The report indicated that Mayhew had initially purchased the handheld gaming console – a Nintendo DS – from a local Walmart store on December 23rd. He paid the full new device price for the console, expecting to get a product that had never been used or opened. When his son opened the system on Christmas morning, everything about the DS seemed to be in order: by all accounts, it was a great gift for an eight-year-old boy.

But then Mayhew discovered something, or rather, his son did. While hosting family for the holidays, Mayhew’s son and a few other young kids – nieces and nephews, mostly – started testing out one of the special functions of the Nintendo DS. Like so many other modern electronic devices, the DS is not just used for gaming applications, but for photography as well. The kids started playing around with the device and taking pictures. When a new picture was snapped, the shot stored itself to a file of photos. But when Mayhew’s son opened up the file to look at the pictures he and his cousins had taken, he found a number of pictures that he had definitely never taken.

When Mayhew saw the pornographic photos that had been saved to the picture file of the Nintendo DS, he was shocked and outraged. He originally wondered whether someone at Nintendo had made a big mistake or was simply playing some sick, cruel joke on holiday buyers. But the photos were timestamped just a few weeks ago – on December 1st, 2013 – and Walmart’s stock of the Nintendo DS has probably been sitting on the shelf for months. The logical answer? Someone had already bought the DS.

Mayhew’s theory is that someone else – someone with a taste for explicit pornographic images – purchased the Nintendo DS from Walmart around the Black Friday shopping flurry, but then returned it. Walmart restocked the item to its shelves and sold Mayhew a used product. Mayhew’s son then discovered the previous user’s unsavory photo library, which the user had neglected to delete or destroy.

The Hampton Walmart store from which Mayhew bought the device has not yet been reached for comment.