DOJ: Six Men Sentenced for Their Roles in an International Child P0rn Production Ring

quote:

---

Orgasming to ‘100 Pubescent Girls Touch Themselves’

---

quote:

---

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Six Men Sentenced for Their Roles in an International Child Pornography Production Ring

---

quote:

---

Six men from around the country were sentenced today and yesterday for participating in an international child pornography production ring, announced Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, United States Attorney Matthew Schneider of the Eastern District of Michigan, and Special Agent in Charge Timothy R. Slater of the FBI, Detroit Division.

---

quote:

---

According to court records, these six men worked together from 2013 to April of 2017, with other men both inside and outside of the United States, to lure juvenile girls to two different unmonitored video chat websites and sexually exploit them. The men recruited the victims from common social media platforms by pretending to be teenage boys interested in chatting with the girls in real time. Once the victims arrived in the chatrooms, the group—all pretending to be teenagers—worked together to build trust and convince the child to engage in sexually explicit conduct on web camera. The group members then recorded that activity and shared it with each other. The girls were unaware that the men were making recordings, or what they dubbed “captures,” of the sexual activity.

Through their scheme, the group successfully recorded tens of thousands of sexually explicit videos of minors, some as young as 11 years old. The defendants preyed on more than 100 victims, some of whom were present for the sentencing hearing and made statements to the Court. Still other victims have not been identified. The FBI has so-far identified 48 victims in the United States. “The six men sentenced today are an example of a disturbing and reprehensible new trend: the ‘crowdsourcing’ of child exploitation,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski. “These highly organized and coldly calculating defendants worked together over the course of several years, pretending to be teenage boys in order to entice more than 100 minor girls—some as young as 11 years old—into producing child pornography which the defendants then shared with each other.

---