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There are 28 listed in the indictment and identified by letters of the alphabet.Īlexander, the prosecutor, said Amin allegedly had victims in at least 15 states.Īnd offenders like Amin tend to try to take advantage of a child’s understandable shame of being exploited by using threats, Alexander said.

The indictment says Amin distributed the child pornography to other co-conspirators, whose names are also redacted, using the file-sharing app Dropbox.įederal prosecutors with the Department of Justice said in a statement Thursday that Amin had targeted hundreds of victims, and according to the indictment, at least one was as young as 11 years old. The indictment, which includes more than 30 aliases for Amin, all redacted, says Snapchat would shut down Amin’s accounts for violating its terms of service, but he repeatedly opened new accounts. He then allegedly threatened to send the child pornography to the victims’ friends, family or classmates if they stopped sending photos and videos, a threat he followed through on multiple occasions. “And then we’re very fortunate here just to have close working relationships between state and local and federal law enforcement agencies.”Ī grand jury had indicted Amin in July on 13 charges related to his alleged sexual exploitation of children through social media apps, according to a redacted version of the indictment that a judge ordered unsealed Wednesday.Īccording to the indictment, Amin posed as a teenager on Instagram to meet minors, who he convinced to send him sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves on a different social media app, Snapchat. “We had a victim here in Alaska who, to her great credit, had the courage to make a report to the Alaska State Troopers,” Assistant U.S.

The investigation that she set in motion also led to the arrest of a man described as the conspiracy’s ringleader more than 6,000 miles away: Zobaidul Amin, a 24-year-old Bangladeshi national the Royal Malaysia Police apprehended in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in September. This story originally appeared on Alaska Public Media and is republished here with permission.Īn Alaska girl’s report to authorities that she had been extorted for sexually explicit images of herself started an investigation into what prosecutors say is “one of the most malicious” child pornography schemes the FBI has ever seen.

Courthouse and Federal Building in Anchorage on Oct.