Foreign National Sentenced for Trafficking Child Pornography
A Bulgarian national was sentenced today to 25 years in prison for conspiracy to traffic images and videos depicting the sexual exploitation of young children.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Plamen Georgiev Velinov, 49, of Sofia, helped manage and administer the Newstar Enterprise, an internet-based business that profited from the sexual exploitation of vulnerable children under the guise of “child modeling,” through a collection of websites called the Newstar Websites. Beginning in around 2006 and continuing until 2019, Velinov assisted the enterprise by selecting children to be featured on the Newstar Websites, editing images and videos on those websites, communicating with customers, setting prices for videos, activating new websites, and creating advertising banners. While chatting with a co-conspirator, Velinov described one child as “nuclear sexy.” Financial records show that U.S.-based co-conspirators transferred more than $400,000 to Velinov’s Bulgarian bank account in connection with the conspiracy.
The Newstar Enterprise, which was founded around 2005, built and operated the Newstar Websites on servers in the United States and abroad. To generate content for the Newstar Websites, Newstar Enterprise members sourced, enticed, solicited, and recruited males and females under the age of 18, many of whom were prepubescent, to use as “child models” for the Newstar Websites. The Newstar Enterprise used the child victims to produce more than 4.6 million sexualized images and videos – including images and videos depicting children as young as six years old in sexual and provocative poses and wearing revealing underwear, clothing and costumes – that were distributed and sold through the Newstar Websites. Many of the child victims were recruited from Ukraine, Moldova, and other nations in Eastern Europe and were particularly vulnerable due to their age and socio-economic status.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/foreign-national-sentenced-trafficking-child-pornography
