Forest Hills Man Lured 12-Year-Old To Make Child Porn: Feds

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS -- A Forest Hills man will spend the next 10 years in federal prison for luring a 12-year-old girl he met on Facebook to take explicit photos of herself and then sharing them across social media, prosecutors said.

Christopher Arroyo, 26, was sentenced in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday for coercing the teen to take the explicit photos of herself engaging in sex acts from 2012 to 2015. When she refused, he posted the photos online in an attempt to publicly shame her, said United States Attorney Richard Donoghue.

Arroyo and the then-12-year-old first met over Facebook in 2012. Soon after, he began convincing her to take sexually explicit photos of herself and engage in other sex acts as he directed, according to the charges.

He continued to exploit the teen for years, harassing her and threatening to post the photos all over the internet when she refused his demands, prosecutors said.

Arroyo made good on those threats in 2015, posting explicit photos of the teenager to multiple fake social media accounts he'd created.

The FBI traced the online activity to Arroyo's Forest Hills home, where they seized his computers and electronics. A forensics test of the devices unveiled the explicit photos inside an electronic folder with the teen's name on it, charges state.

Arroyo was convicted of coercing and enticing a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct. On top of his 10-year prison sentence, a federal judge also ordered he serve 5 years probation, register as a sex offender and be banned from unsupervised contact with minors.

"Today's sentence will serve not only to protect the public from the defendant for a significant period of time, but it will serve as a message to other child predators using the Internet to target victims that they will be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Donoghue said.

Lead image via Shutterstock.