BALTIMORE — A Baltimore man pleaded guilty to creating child pornography by pretending to be a teen girl online, and getting teen boys to send him sexually explicit images.
Matthew K. Walsh, 24, targeted more than 40 boys, ages 12 to 17, and selling or distributing images of more than 30 of them.
He is facing federal charges of sexually exploiting minors in order to create child pornography. He could be sentenced to up to 30 years in jail, said the U.S. Attorney's Office today.
Walsh created fake profiles, pretending to be a young girl, on multiple platforms from at least 2016 through 2021. He used 17 Google accounts, 22 Twitter accounts, 4 Facebook accounts, 7 Instagram accounts, 6 Snap accounts, 3 Dropbox accounts, 3 TextNow accounts, a Kik account, an Apple account, and an Oath/Yahoo! account.
Walsh would solicit boys ages 12 to 17 to get sexual images and videos. After getting them, he extorted them to keep sending him specific images, and threatened to send the images to their friends, family and classmates if they refused to listen to him.
Walsh ultimately got about 2,000 explicit images and videos, and earned about $8,000 from selling the files. He admitted to harassing and threatening some of the teens for years.
