The target of the FBI investigation made a stunning admission: He conspired with others in an elaborate scheme, using Chateen, to trick or force young girls into sex acts on web cams and extort them. And he knew other groups who ran similar, coordinated scams. — Image by pvproductions on Freepik
CLEVELAND: The group of men from across the country gathered on Skype to coordinate for a sinister goal: to trick girls as young as 11 to undress and perform sex acts in front of a web camera, authorities say.
The group’s members secretly recorded the girls and then ruthlessly blackmailed them, forcing the youths to continue the performances under the threat of releasing the video to family, friends and anyone with access to the Internet, according to court documents.
Everyone in the group had assigned roles: talkers, loopers, watchers and perhaps the most important - the “hunter,” the one who stalked online chatrooms in search of vulnerable girls to exploit, prosecutors said.
The FBI, after a winding investigation that began in 2015 in Detroit, identified the hunter as David Pece, a computer programmer who lived with his father in Highland Heights.
On Jan 16, Pece will go in front of a federal judge in Akron. He faces between 24 and 30 years in prison for conspiring to engage in the sexual exploitation of children.
Brian Levine, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, published an extensive study in 2022 for the US Department of Justice on the crime. It said groups like Pece’s are among the most alarming form of online predators.
“That particular set of what I called enterprise perpetrators I thought was the most disturbing,” Levine said in an interview. “There was a lot that was disturbing there.”
He said it shows the devastation that can occur with unmonitored apps, a lack of governmental regulations and lax oversight by large companies like Google and Apple that sell the apps to consumers.
“When a group of motivated perpetrators get together and there’s no rules, this is exactly how bad that can be,” Levine said. “It should be a cautionary tale for other social media platforms and apps out there that they really have a role in this and a responsibility.”
FBI investigation begins in 2015
Pece’s crew is one of at least seven groups dismantled by the FBI. Each used similar methods to blackmail young girls while using the Spain-based website Chateen.com. The site billed itself as an online dating website for people 13 to 19 years old. It has since been taken down.
The FBI’s investigation into Chateen started in 2015, when an FBI agent in Detroit raided the home of someone suspected of possessing child pornography.
The target of the FBI investigation made a stunning admission: He conspired with others in an elaborate scheme, using Chateen, to trick or force young girls into sex acts on web cams and extort them. And he knew other groups who ran similar, coordinated scams.
He allowed the agent to use his Chateen log-in information and online identity to interact with other groups.
After the FBI agent spent three weeks on the site, he wrote that it appeared the website existed only as a conduit for child sexual predators to interact with young girls, according to an unsealed search warrant affidavit.
In the ensuing years, federal prosecutors charged more than 90 people and identified dozens of others who participated in the schemes and lived outside the country.
The seven groups victimised tens of thousands of young girls across the country, according to Levine’s study.
New groups continue popping up and evolving. The FBI in September sent out an alert notifying the public, saying the groups target vulnerable young people and force them to self-mutilate on camera.
The leader of the original group, Michael Berenson of Shoreline, Washington, was sentenced to 55 years in prison. He supplied the roadmap for groups like Pece’s to set up, organise, deceive, extort and abuse victims over and over.
Investigation leads to Highland Heights
The FBI’s investigation made its way to Pece’s doorstep and shocked his family when agents raided the home in 2018, agents said in reports.
Born prematurely at 23 weeks gestation, about one shy of what is typically considered viable outside the womb, he spent five months in MetroHealth Medical Center’s intensive care unit. He was so small his parents dressed him in Cabbage Patch doll clothes.
Pece suffered from hearing impairment, learning disabilities and spiral meningitis, among other health issues, while attending Lakewood schools as a child. He later transferred to North Royalton High School, where he graduated in 2009.
Pece went on to earn an associate’s degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in applied science and worked for about seven years for a Northeast Ohio firm, where he loaded software onto computers.
Pece was unable to care for himself, so he lived at times with his mother or father and had a low IQ, his attorneys said in court records.
Coordinated efforts
Pece’s role as the hunter was crucial, prosecutors said. The scheme started with him.
He trolled social media websites, usually Kik or MyLol, looking for girls - especially those who talked or posted about suicide, self-mutilation or depression.
Pece also looked for girls – usually between 14 and 16 – who received little attention online, believing they would be more likely to fall victim to the plan.
When he found one he thought he could exploit, he messaged the girl, pretending to be a 16-year-old boy. He then lured her in.
Once in the chatroom, a “talker” took over. In Pece’s group, that was Ethan Shives, a 32-year-old Big Pool, Maryland, man who lived his entire life in his parents’ house and never held a job.
Shives’ role was to message with whatever young girl Pece lured to Chateen. Chats typically started out friendly, then involved increasingly sexual “dares” until the girl performed a sexual act on camera. Shives was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role.
If a girl hesitated, the group used a “looper,” who would play a pre-recorded video of another teen to ease her fears. The video was played to make it appear the teen was talking in real-time to the girl.
Others acted as “watchers” and kept an eye out for law enforcement joining the chat, according to court records.
Pece’s group – called the Zhit Group or Basenation – operated from October 2015 to March 2016. A federal grand jury handed up charges against its members in 2020.
Others charged in the case included:
- Mark Delacruz, 34, of Temple City, California, who portrayed himself online as a 15-year-old boy named Matt and targeted girls as young as 13. Authorities found 244 child exploitation videos from the group on his computer.
- Myron Brown, 62, of Columbia, South Carolina, was an electronic engineer. He lured children from MyLoL to Chateen and admitted to FBI agents that he had been downloading child pornography for at least 10 years.
- Steven Foster, 48, of Portsmouth, Ohio.
- Richard Avery, 52, of Oceanview, California, who admitted to targeting girls as young as 12.
- Richard Eby, a former member of the US Air Force who worked as a contractor for North American Aerospace Defense Command before retiring on disability and working at Home Depot.
- Eby, 60, of Portland, Oregon, had 5,455 images of child pornography and 422 videos on his computer and electronics seized by the FBI, prosecutors said. He’d been involved in more than 9,000 chats on Chateen, according to court records.
Five of the seven, including Pece and Shives, have pleaded guilty.
Delacruz and Brown face 24 to 30 years in prison, while Avery could get between seven and 10 years. Eby and Foster have pleaded not guilty, and their trial is scheduled for Jan 22.
Some of the victims are from Michigan, Virginia and Texas.
FBI agent Adam Christensen, who investigated the case, testified during one hearing that Pece “was the most persistent and relentless of the group in getting girls to take off their clothes on camera,” court records said.
Few specifics are laid out in court records, though prosecutors highlighted one chat:
After entrapping a 13-year-old girl in the group’s web, the girl said that she was going to take her own life.
Pece responded coldly by telling her to take off her clothes and turn on her web camera.
Trauma ‘unimaginable’ for victims
Levine’s research delved into the trauma caused to the victims. He said the group’s actions amounted to torture.
“It’s not just a series of pictures or videos,” Levine said. “It’s just unimaginable. I was overwhelmed with how bad this was.”
Victims suffered from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and self-mutilation. Several attempted suicide. One, Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old girl targeted by Berenson’s group, took her own life.
“These cases demonstrate that a small number of individuals can band together in an exploitation enterprise and multiply by many times the number of victims and the amount of damage and pain they cause, compared to working alone,” Levine wrote in his research for the Justice Department.
“They demonstrate how communities of people who abuse children have leveraged social media sites and apps to find victims and each other, and to train each other and normalise their deviancy.”
David Finkelhor, the director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, said his work showed that image-based sexual abuse has long-lasting effects.
“It’s particularly impactful because of the sense that (the victims’) vulnerabilities are ongoing. You don’t know when or where someone might get access to them,” Finkelhor said. “They have a sense that they don’t have control over their life, and it affects their ability to trust in relationships.”
What should change?
Levine’s study suggested that the problem is so widespread it should be treated holistically, as a public health crisis. He and Finkelhor outlined several changes that could help stop children from becoming online victims:
- Congress should pass a law that would give more prison time for those who work in groups to exploit children.
- App makers should be required to monitor their sites and disclose not just what the app is intended for, but what it’s being used for.
- Age verification should be required for all app users. Accounts should be linked to an adult or parent. End-to-end chat encryption should not be allowed for children.
- The Federal Trade Commission should increase regulation of apps. Levine likened them to modern-day toy stores. If toys could be dangerous, such as having small parts that a toddler could choke on, the makers are required to carry warning labels. Apps should also warn users and parents.
“They’re really like the biggest toy stores in the world now,” Levine said. “I just don’t understand when phones are so common with kids, and Google and Apple are among the richest companies in the world, why can’t they do more to warn parents and kids and take responsibility for the apps in their stores?”
Finkelhor said education, for both parents and kids, is critical and should come from schools, churches and other youth organisations.
“We have to do a better job helping kids navigate this territory,” Finkelhor said. “We need to build adequate protections. That should be a high priority. We’ve seen how technology can turn very quickly.” – cleveland.com/Tribune News Service
Those suffering from problems can reach out to the Mental Health Psychosocial Support Service at 03-2935 9935 or 014-322 3392; Talian Kasih at 15999 or 019-261 5999 on WhatsApp; Jakim’s (Department of Islamic Development Malaysia) family, social and community care centre at 0111-959 8214 on WhatsApp; and Befrienders Kuala Lumpur at 03-7627 2929 or go to befrienders.org.my/centre-in-malaysia for a full list of numbers nationwide and operating hours, or email sam@befrienders.org.my.
