Virginia Man Who Exploited Dozens of Girls on Snapchat Gets 40 Years in Prison

A person holds a phone displaying the Snapchat app, in this photo illustration on Aug. 11, 2026. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times

A 24-year-old Virginia man was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges related to his use of the Snapchat social media platform to coerce dozens of girls, ages 12 to 17, “to engage in sexually explicit conduct,” the Justice Department said in a Sept. 25 news release.

Malachi Morgan Thomas received the sentence for “sexual exploitation of children and possession of child sexual abuse material,” the news release said, noting that he pleaded guilty in April.

Darren Cox, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington office, said Thomas caused “profound harm” to the victims. Cox said he hopes that the victims feel “some measure of justice” was done, and he emphasized the FBI’s dedication to rooting out offenders who prey on children.

Thomas also met at least one victim at her home, videoed himself assaulting her, then saved the recording in his Snapchat account, the release said. Police found the June 2020 video about a month later when he tried to meet another victim at a shopping mall—where her father showed up instead, leading to a confrontation that resulted in police confiscating his cellphone.

“His tactics—leveraging hacked accounts, fear of physical harm, psychological manipulation, and physical assaults—underscore the gravity of his abusive and horrific crimes,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in the release.

Thomas’s sentence reflects the severity of his offenses, said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Theophani Stamos for the Eastern District of Virginia, calling his pursuit of victims “reprehensible and unrelenting.”

He directed the girls to produce explicit images and “to engage in sexually explicit conduct during live video calls,” the Justice Department said, adding that “Thomas told victims he led a criminal organization and that as long as they did what he told them they would be safe,” but he threatened harm to them if they didn’t comply.

Thomas knew that some of the girls he selected had mental health issues or had been previously abused sexually, the Justice Department said.

Trial Attorney Alicia A. Bove of the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Lauren Halper for the Eastern District of Virginia handled the prosecution.

Thomas’s case was part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative that the Justice Department launched this year “to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse,” the release said.

It employs federal, state, and local resources “to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.”

A spokeswoman for Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ emailed request for comment on the case.