Washington Man Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Engaging in Child Exploitation Enterprise

PHILADELPHIA – United States Attorney William M. McSwain announced that Sharif El-Battouty, 45, of Puyallup, WA, was sentenced by United States District Court Judge Harvey Bartle III to 30 years’ imprisonment and a lifetime of supervised release for engaging in a child exploitation enterprise and conspiracy to advertise child pornography.

El-Battouty – using the online alias “Fritos” – posted videos and images of child pornography in various text channels on the online-sharing platform Discord. Discord is a public communications service that permits users to create “servers,” or collections of chat rooms. These servers are capable of hosting numerous Discord users who communicate with each other through text chat messages visible to all other users present in that room, post video and image files for other users to download, and send links to material stored elsewhere on the Internet for retrieval by those users.

El-Battouty also actively produced child pornography by communicating directly with scores of minor children over the Internet using manipulation and deception to entice them into transmitting sexually explicit video and images of themselves, which the defendant and his co-conspirators would then record. Two of the Discord servers utilized in this conspiracy, titled “Camgirls” and “Thot Counselors,” facilitated the acquisition and dissemination of child pornography over various video-streaming platforms including Omegle, live.me, Periscope, and Skype.

“Child exploitation offenses are some of the most appalling crimes that we see in our society,” said U.S. Attorney McSwain. “Through his heinous scheme, El-Battouty perpetually victimized children by using Discord to download and share images of their abuse with others. Our community is much safer with the defendant behind bars for decades to come.”

“Sharif El-Battouty manipulated underage girls into sharing explicit images of themselves,” said Michael J. Driscoll, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. “He then passed that child pornography to other online predators, furthering his victims’ sexual exploitation. The FBI is gratified to bring him to justice and to know he’ll be behind bars for some time, where he can’t continue to perpetrate such abhorrent acts against innocent children.”

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Kevin Jayne and Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section Attorneys Lauren Britsch and Kaylynn Shoop.