A former airline pilot has been sentenced to 180 months in federal prison after being found guilty of committing ‘sextortion’ offences against a number of underage girls in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Devery Thomas Moses, 29, of Kenosha, Wisconsin was arrested in 2019 following a Snapchat tipoff. The tipoff claimed a Snapchat user had been pestering a 12-year-old girl for indecent images who eventually did send explicit images of herself but then blocked the account.
The perpetrator, however, created a new username and got back in contact with the girl. He threatened to expose her publicly unless she continued to send indecent images of herself.
Special agents used a number of different social media platforms to trace the perpetrator and uncovered seven different email addresses that all linked back to Moses. A Dropbiox account containing indecent images of underage girls was also linked to Moses.
“Filings indicate that after Moses received sexually explicit photographs and videos from his victims, he threatened to expose them on social media if they did not comply with his demand for increasingly outrageous and outlandish sexual acts,” the U.S. Attorneys Office said on Tuesday.
Following his arrest, Moses was charged with four counts of sexual exploitation of a child and six counts of possession of child pornography. The federal sentence imposed against Moses for sexual exploitation will run concurrently alongside a state conviction for possessing child pornography.
Filings in the case reveal that many of Moses’ victims continue to suffer from significant trauma and one victim has suffered suicidal thoughts.
The investigation and subsequent conviction of Moses took “extraordinary efforts” according to Assistant United States Attorneys Megan J. Paulson and Abbey Marzick.
The case was brought under Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative that aims to fight the growing “epidemic” of child sexual exploitation and abuse. The project was launched in 2006 and has helped increase the number of indictments in these types of cases by 40 per cent.
