VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — A Virginia Beach man has pleaded guilty to his role in scaring kids into creating child porn.
Justin Whichard, 24, pleaded guilty to production of images of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
Court records outline how Whichard started chatting online with the two victims who were both 14-year-old girls in 2023.
It states he would foster a romantic or sexual dynamic, then threaten to reveal their identities to their families unless they produced child porn for him.
He admitted to then taking the child porn he coerced the girls into creating and attempted to extort an adult male by pretending to be the minor victims, demanding hundreds of dollars from the man, according to the records.
After searching his phone in July 2023, law enforcement said they found over 200 illegal pictures and images and even scripts he had saved that he would send to victims, describing exactly what he wanted them to do in the video, even demanding they say his name while they were recording.
"He even created a script for them… It was almost as if he is the conductor of his criminal activity," said Richard James, a crime analyst.
While out on bond, Whichard took off and was eventually arrested in March 2024 in Tennessee with two more images of child porn on his phone.
The FBI has reported seeing a huge increase in the number of sextortion cases involving children and teens where they are threatened and coerced into sending explicit images online.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said they saw an 82% increase in these crimes in 2022.
"Don't ever give in to somebody requesting more sexual videos, photos, because it will not stop there," said Meredith Williams of Samaritan House crisis services.
Experts say parents need to know what their kids are looking at online and have difficult conversations about the dangers out there.
"The good news is that our law enforcement and federal agents have the tools to find these people. The bad news is that there's so many of them out there that they're not going to be able to get to all of them at one time," said James.
Whichard is scheduled to be sentenced in September in federal court.
