A 21-year-old Austin man has been sentenced to 24 years and 4 months in federal prison after federal officials said he posed online as a teenage girl to trick boys into sending sexually explicit material and money, then threatened to expose them if they refused to keep paying. Tre Von Lamount Harris built the scheme around a fake persona, according to federal officials, which he used to solicit sexually explicit material from victims before extorting them.
According to the Austin American-Statesman, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas said Harris used social media platforms and Cash App to pose as a girl named Michelle starting when he was just 16 years old, later adopting a second alias, Karla, to continue the ruse. Federal officials said Harris obtained child sexual abuse material from victims and later extorted them for money. The indictment alleged that Harris sexually exploited juvenile males.
Threats to Expose Victims if They Didn’t Pay
Officials said that when victims refused to keep sending money, Harris threatened to post their child sexual abuse material online or send it directly to their friends and family. The Statesman reports that Harris was arrested on federal charges in May 2024.
The case escalated months later when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received tips from social media providers and private citizens in December 2022 about one or more of Harris’s online accounts, according to the Statesman’s reporting. The FBI investigated the case. In May 2024, Harris was arrested on federal charges.
Federal Charges Detailed a Broader Pattern
Separate from the Statesman’s account, the FBI said Harris was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of sexual exploitation of children and one count of interstate communication of a threat or extortion, as reported by Yahoo News. That indictment alleged the scheme targeted juvenile males from as early as November 2022 until his arrest in May 2024. The FBI said Harris posed as a teenage female named Michelle on social media and targeted mostly males under 18 in order to obtain sexually explicit images, then allegedly tried to extort them for money or threatened to release the videos to people on their friends lists, per the outlet’s report.
Sextortion Reports Have Surged Nationally
Harris’s case lands amid a documented nationwide spike in sextortion targeting minors. The FBI has reported at least a 20% increase in reported financially motivated sextortion incidents involving minor victims between October 2022 and March 2023 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the FBI figures cited by Yahoo News. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received more than 50,000 reports of financially motivated sextortion in 2025 alone, averaging 137 reports per day, up significantly from more than 36,000 reports in 2024, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The organization also said that when a victim’s relationship to the person reporting was known, 94% of public sextortion reports came from the child victim or their parent, and noted that offenders are increasingly moving conversations to private messaging and encrypted apps, making it harder to detect and connect related cases. Research from Thorn, which examined more than 15 million CyberTipline reports from 2020 to 2023, found that 90% of victims detected in NCMEC reports were male and aged 14 to 17, and that more than two-thirds of reports appeared to be financially motivated. The same research found that among victims who reported paying their perpetrator, 27% described facing ongoing demands after their first payment.
