Intercept Task Force fights online sextortion involving children

Online predators are finding ways to lure children into sharing nude images.

The Intercept Task Force was created one year ago to combat this growing problem and hunt down these predators.

WINK News anchor Corey Lazar exclusively sat down with the top investigator in Collier County to see the number of arrests so far.

“Child exploitation, human trafficking is primarily facilitated through online digital evidence,” said Collier County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Wade Williams.

Williams leads the intercept task force at CCSO.

It’s a public-private partnership between the non-profit Operation Lightshine and a majority of law enforcement agencies in Southwest Florida to hunt down online child predators.

“Technology comes in to help us sort through all this data because to do it manually would take, you know, one case, we’d be sitting there for weeks and weeks,” said Williams.

The process used to take investigators longer.

“It used to be that we had to go through these devices and all these artifacts one at a time, so that was very labor intensive,” said Williams.

Over the last year with the intercept task force, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office has made 44 arrests.

“There’s a number of notable arrests, and I would say that in a generalized statement of all the arrests, is what we found is that the ones that are child predators, we’re finding numerous child victims, in many cases, sometimes five, sometimes six victims,” said Williams. “In the case of Miguel Mendiola, potentially 59 child victims.”

Mendiola, from Immokalee, was arrested in May. He’s accused of luring children but not from the normal social media sites.

“He was going on a variety of different child gaming applications, Rec Room being one of them, Roblox being another one,” said Williams. “He would then engage with children on those applications and then move them over to Skype, because he wanted to engage in a live video chat with them, where he had manipulated them into performing various sexual acts, and he would actually pay them.”

WINK asked Williams if it was possible Mendiola was distributing the content to a larger network.

“The evidence indicates this individual is saving them for himself, but also sharing them with what we call global trading networks, other predators around the world,” said Williams.

Another arrest was Justin Dougall, a one-time local park ranger.

“We’ve since located a very large amount of child sexual abuse material on his devices, which we’re actually going through right now could be as upwards is 10 to 11 terabytes of data,” said Williams. “Also some of the chats that we’ve identified in his case indicate that he was at least fantasizing about luring children off the beach to abuse them.”

Both men we mentioned in this story are moving through the legal system and awaiting their day in court.

Zooming out from Collier County and to all the Southwest Florida law enforcement agencies that are part of the Intercept Task Force, over the past year there have been:

• 1,052 investigations
• 158 search warrants executed
• 63 arrests
• 90 local child victims have been identified