A Bangladeshi man accused of using social media to trick teenage girls into sending him sexually explicit images and threatening to share them with friends and family if they didn’t send him more has been extradited to Alaska to face federal charges of child sexual exploitation.
Jobaidul Amin, 28, pleaded not guilty Thursday in his first court appearance in Anchorage after the FBI detained him in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, U.S. prosecutors wrote in a detention memo.
“Amin took pleasure in sexually abusing hundreds of minor victims through social media,” the document said. “He bragged about causing his victims to commit suicide and harm themselves. He shared hundreds of nude images and videos of underage victims on the internet and encouraged other perpetrators to do the same.”
A federal grand jury indicted Amin in 2022 on charges including child pornography, cyberstalking and wire fraud. He often used false identities, pretending to be teenagers, to trick victims into sending him explicit images, prosecutors said.
The investigation began when a 14-year-old girl in Alaska reported her abuse to law enforcement, saying he threatened her friends and followers by sending them pornographic images of her after they stopped communicating with her.
Executing dozens of search warrants and subpoenas, investigators eventually learned his identity and realized he had done similar things to hundreds of underage victims, prosecutors wrote. The only way to get Amin to stop demanding more images, Amin said, was to recruit other victims.
“Because Amin was in Malaysia and his victims were primarily in the United States, Amin viewed himself as untouchable by law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote. “In one conversation, he told the minor victim that the police would not do anything and that the police would not pursue me because I did not live near you.”
Efforts to extradite Amin to face charges failed. But the Justice Department said Malaysian authorities brought the charges with assistance from the FBI. He was released on bail during the trial, and the United States eventually succeeded in deporting him from Malaysia. The FBI took him into custody and took him to Alaska.
“The FBI’s commitment to protecting our children from exploitation does not change whether the criminal is in the United States or abroad,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a press release.
U.S. Magistrate Kyle Reardon on Thursday ordered Amin to remain in custody while the case proceeds.
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