EGN NEWS DESK
John Mathew Piecuch, 64, admitted the felony depend throughout a listening to at U.S. District Court in Santa Ana. Federal prosecutors agreed to drop two associated costs underneath the plea settlement.
Federal Judge John Holcomb scheduled a sentencing listening to for Oct. 25. Piecuch is going through a most sentence of 30 years in jail.
The defendant stays held with out bail at a federal detention middle.
Court filings by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI mentioned that Piecuch was utilizing the net gaming platform Roblox in December 2020 when he met the sufferer, recognized solely as a Carroll County, Maryland, woman.
The defendant satisfied her that he was a 13-year-old boy, and the 2 then engaged in a sequence of textual content messages, by means of which he coaxed her into sending him sexually specific photographs of herself, and moreover satisfied her to snap specific photographs of her 5-year-old sister, additionally not recognized, and ship him these, in keeping with courtroom papers.
The woman’s mom uncovered the texts in January 2021 and instantly reported the exercise to her native sheriff’s workplace, whose personnel contacted the FBI, culminating in an investigation by the Inland Regional Child Exploitation & Human Trafficking Task Force. That led to a search of Piecuch’s residence at 26216 Frazier St., courtroom papers acknowledged.
He was arrested with out incident and in the end indicted.
“This defendant has admitted his despicable acts and now will face a big jail sentence,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada mentioned in a press release. “I urge mother and father all over the place to be vigilant relating to their youngsters’s on-line utilization. Predators lurk within the shadows and use the web’s cloak of anonymity to inflict life-long trauma.”
Piecuch has no documented prior felony convictions.
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