US authorities have sentenced 53-year-old Florida resident Patrice Eileen Wilowski-Mevorah to five years and three months in jail for engaging in an ML scheme linked to a Florida-based international, online, subscription-based, sexually-exploitative enterprise. Wilowski-Mevorah must also forfeit $236,410.70 as part of her sentence.
Since 2009, Wilowski-Mevorah had been working for the Newstar Enterprise, a company that ran for-profit websites generating and hosting sexually provocative or explicit photos and videos of vulnerable children, promoted as ‘child modeling’ content. Founded in 2005, Newstar used servers located in the US and abroad. The company’s employees coerced and recruited underage males and females, some as young as 6 years old, mostly from poverty-stricken regions of eastern European nations like Ukraine and Moldova. They then used them as ‘child models’ for the Newstar websites. Newstar Enterprise generated over 4.6 million sexualized and provocative images and videos of these child victims for online sale and distribution.
Newstar Enterprise’s subscribers came from 101 countries, generating earnings of more than $9.4 million during its operation. The company’s employees fraudulently opened merchant and bank accounts in the US to launder these illicit funds. During 2009-2019, Wilowski-Mevorah laundered at least $2.3 million for Newstar Enterprise, by using a phony jewelry company to conceal the criminal proceeds and transfer them back to the owners of Newstar Enterprise. In November 2019, US authorities simultaneously seized and disabled Newstar’s servers in the US and Europe.
Source: US Department of Justice