Man gets federal prison sentence in sextortion case involving Clinton County girl
GRAND RAPIDS — A man accused of targeting girls across the U.S. in a sextortion scheme, including a 13-year-old girl from Clinton County, was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison on Tuesday.
Brandon Huu Le, 22, of Maitland, Florida, was indicted in late 2022 on charges involving sexual exploitation, coercion or enticement of children and receiving child pornagraphy. He pleaded guilty to the pornography count in May, court records indicate,
U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker gave Le 70 months in prison, plus five years on supervised release after he leaves prison, and ordered he pay resitution and a special assessment fee totaling nearly $18,000, court records said.
The government said Le used social media app Snapchat to contact at least 270 girls between August and December 2019 and, in at least some of those cases, threatened to publish private or sensitive information unless they sent him sexually explicit pictures or video.
One of those cases involved a 13-year-old girl from Clinton County, officials said. Le steered the conversation toward sex topics and then threatened to post a screenshot online unless the girl provided him with sexually explicit material, U.S. Attorney Mark Totten said in January.
At the time, Totten and other officials warned that a rise in sextortion is "a very deeply disturbing trend."
James Tarasca, special agent in charge of the FBI in Michigan, said his office had received 629 tips about sextortion from across the state over the past two years, including 483 in 2022 alone.
"The use of the internet to threaten and manipulate children into producing sexually explicit images, and then threatening to share or publish those images to get the victims to produce more is predatory conduct that is very harmful to minor victims," Tarasco said in a news release. "I commend the young victims who came forward to report Le's behavior."
The charges resulted from "a fairly broad investigation" that required unraveling the online identities of Le and potential victims, an official said in January.
In sentencing Le, Jonker said Le's threats were "serious, graphic, coercive and manipulative," the U.S. Attorney's office said in a news release.
Totten said the threats had "a devastating" impact on Le's victims.
"Sextortion is a growing threat in Michigan and across the nation, and my office will continue to hold these perpetrators accountable," he said in the news release.
Contact Ken Palmer at kpalmer@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @KBPalm_lsj.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Man gets 70 months in sextortion case involving Clinton County girl
