Florida man who posed as teen to sexually exploit girls gets 20-year prison sentence

A Florida man who pretended to be a teen on social media to get a 13-year-old girl to send him nude videos of herself was sentenced this week at federal court in West Palm Beach to 20 years in prison, court records show.

Olinto Ignacio Lynch of Lake Worth Beach was also condemned Monday to a lifetime of supervised release on charges of production of child pornography. The 28-year-old, federal agents say, also established a relationship with another 13-year-old girl that lasted more than a year — even driving to South Carolina to meet her.

Starting in 2020, Lynch chatted with at least two 13-year-old girls via Snapchat, a social media platform, according to investigators. They say he told the girls he was a 16-year-old boy and used “sexually charged conversations” to request sexually explicit photos from one of them.

In another instance, according to Lynch’s criminal complaint, he also sent sexually explicit pictures of himself to one of the teens.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida said Wednesday in a news release that Lynch promised the girls gifts and “preyed upon their troubled lives” — offering to be their “sugar daddy.”

This all came to an end, agents say, after the mother of the girl who sent the explicit content uncovered the conversations and reported Lynch’s social media profile to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Law enforcement officers executed a search warrant on Lynch’s social media account as well as his Lake Worth residence, finding sexual exploitation videos of the girl on his cellphone.

There they also discovered that Lynch, who was born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, was residing illegally in the United States since 2020, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Wednesday.