Law enforcement officers Friday arrested a Los Angeles man on child sexual exploitation charges, alleging he met at least eight teenage girls on the internet and pressured them — sometimes by threatening suicide — into sending him sexually explicit images of themselves.
Francisco Sanchez, 30, of Koreatown, is scheduled to be arraigned Friday afternoon on an 11-count federal grand jury indictment in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles.
Sanchez is charged in the indictment with seven counts of production of child pornography, one count of distribution of child pornography, one count of possession of child pornography and two counts of cyberstalking, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
According to the indictment, between January 2014 and September 2016, Sanchez, posing as a teenage boy, contacted teenage girls online, using the pseudonym Eddie Nash to conceal his identity. He allegedly coerced some of them into producing sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves, sometimes by threatening suicide or threatening to post compromising pictures of the girls online, prosecutors said.
In June 2016, Sanchez, while concealing his identity, allegedly sent a victim a text message and threatened to make her “internet famous” if she continued to ignore him. When the victim replied, “If you do that u will get arrested for child pornography,” Sanchez texted back, “so, but u will be famous” and “so be nice to me, i love u so much, i dont want to hurt u,” the indictment alleges.
The charge of production of child pornography carries a 15-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence. The charge of distributing child pornography carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison. If convicted of all charges, Sanchez could face in excess of 200 years in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The case was investigated by the FBI and the Los Angeles Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.