Baltimore man sentenced for pretending to be female to get sexually explicit photos, videos from minors on social media
BALTIMORE - A Baltimore man was sentenced to 20 years in prison, followed by 30 years of supervised release, for using female aliases on social media apps to entice boys to send him sexually explicit photos and videos.
Matthew Walsh, 25, had been found guilty of sexual exploitation of a minor in order to produce child pornography.
Court documents say Walsh created fictitious online profiles purporting to be a teenage girl to contact and induce minor males between the ages of 12 and 17 to send sexually explicit images and videos to the individual they believed to be a minor female. But instead, it was Walsh.
According to his plea agreement, from at least 2016 through 2021, Walsh created fake profiles on several online platforms posing as a minor female to make contact with minor males between the ages of 12 and 17 to induce them to produce sexually explicit images and videos to send to the purported minor female.
Court documents said that once Walsh obtained the sexually explicit images and videos, he extorted the minor males into producing more sexually explicit images and videos at his instruction and threatened that if they failed to do so, Walsh would send the previously provided images and videos to the minor victims' friends, family, and classmates.
Walsh directed the minor males to send him the images and videos he directed them to produce, and that the images and videos needed to include their face.
According to documents, in some of the communications, by text, email and video, the minor victims are crying and begging Walsh not to send the images and videos to their families and classmates, to leave them alone, and not to make them do more, but Walsh persisted with his threats and demands.
Walsh admitted that he harassed some of the victims for years and obtained hundreds of files depicting sexually explicit conduct from some of the victims. In total, Walsh obtained approximately 2,000 images and videos depicting sexually explicit conduct of the various minor males.
As detailed in the plea agreement, once Walsh received the sexually explicit files from the victims, he saved them into folders of fake names or a variation of the victim's real name in a cloud storage account.
Walsh also uploaded the minor males' files to various Twitter accounts and sold the sexually explicit files of the minors to others, obtaining approximately $8000 from the sale of the files.
Specifically, Walsh communicated with at least 50 different Twitter users interested in purchasing either individual files of child sex abuse material (CSAM), or Walsh's "collections" of CSAM.
The "collections" contained over 100 different victims' files. In several messages, the Twitter users were aware that some of the individuals in the sexually explicit files were as young as 14-years-old.
Several Twitter users exchanged "tips" with Walsh on how to evade law enforcement and discussed methods for enticing and extorting victims' nude images and videos.
Walsh was also a member of online groups which included other offenders who would post, sell, and trade CSAM.
During the investigation, federal search warrants were executed on 17 Google accounts, 22 Twitter accounts, 4 Facebook accounts, 7 Instagram accounts, 6 Snapchat accounts, 3 Dropbox accounts, 3 TextNow accounts, a Kik account, an Apple account, and an Oath/Yahoo! account, all created and utilized by Walsh.
To date over 40 minor males have been positively identified as victims of Walsh's conduct. At least 30 victims' pictures and videos were sold and/or distributed to others by Walsh.
