Australian Teenage Girls Next Target of Accused U.S. Sexual Predator

A former high school cheerleading coach who blackmailed a teenage girl from Colorado to perform sexual acts in video chats may have also prowled on Australian teenage girls. After the teenage girl is convinced to do lewd acts during webcam sessions, the sexual predator distributes the videos to pornographic Web sites.

On July 12, U.S. authorities announced the arrests of 255 suspected child predators as part of a 5-week global hunt. Sixty-one victims were also identified in the global crackdown, known as Operation iGuardian.

Director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement John Morton said that pedophiles and child abusers prowl social media and wait for their chance to force children and teenagers into doing lewd acts online. Sexual predators exploit the young through extortion and deceit.

U.S. and Australian authorities are currently investigating all leads from Operation iGuardian, including the allegation that Jimmy Caraballo-Colon, a suspected 25-year-old Puerto Rican sexual extortioner, targeted teenage girls in Australia.

Meanwhile, a 33-year-old Mexican national, Eduardo Arturo Romero Barrios, was arrested in Monterrey, Mexico, for pretending to be a teenage girl on a social media network to deceive young girls and make them share sexually explicit pictures of themselves. Authorities believe that Mr Barrios may have an Australian girl as his next target.

Court documents in the Caraballo-Colon case revealed that Mr Caraballo-Colon convinced a 17-year-old girl from Colorado to remove her clothes while on an anonymous video chat site. When the teenage girl did what Jimmy wanted, he allegedly said he recorded her and would post the video online if the girl did not give him her email address, phone number, Facebook account and Skype address.

After the girl revealed her personal information, he then blackmailed the girl to perform sexual acts. Jimmy recorded the girl performing the sexual acts then later on directed her to a pornographic Web site.

The young victim found a sexually explicit video of herself in the said porn site. According to authorities, it is the first case of "sextortion" in Puerto Rico.