Teens tricked into sex acts via webcam

An Indiana man has agreed to plead guilty to charges alleging that he tricked more than a dozen teenagers into stripping or performing sexual acts for him via webcam and then used recordings of those sessions to coerce them into making even more explicit videos.

Richard Finkbiner, who lives in the western Indiana community of Brazil, signed an agreement filed in federal court in Terre Haute to plead guilty to child exploitation, extortion and possession of child pornography in exchange for a recommended sentence of 30 to 50 years in prison.

US Attorney Joe Hogsett previously said his office would seek an effective life sentence if a jury convicted Finkbiner.

According to prosecutors, Finkbiner met most or all of his victims on a video chat website, omegle.com, which offers users random, anonymous one-on-one chats with strangers. He would later contact the teens again and threaten to upload the explicit images he recorded of them to porn websites unless they made more videos for his private use.

Prosecutors say the case is “sextortion,” a crime that authorities are seeing with increasing frequency.