Facebook Fake Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Receipt of Child Pornography

OKLAHOMA CITY—Daniel Leslie Mooneyham, 33, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was sentenced to 240 months in prison today by United States District Judge Timothy D. DeGiusti for receipt of child pornography depicting a 15-year-old boy, announced Sanford C. Coats, United States Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma.

According to court records, Mooneyham, using a fake Facebook profile, pretended to be an attractive, 18-year-old blonde female named “Terri Smith.” Posing as Terri Smith, Mooneyham would send Facebook “friend requests” to teenage boys, some of whom he knew through a church youth group and a youth camp where he volunteered. After establishing a Facebook “friendship” with teenage boys while posing as Terri Smith, Mooneyham would solicit pictures of the boys’ genitalia in exchange for sexually explicit photos of Terri Smith. Mooneyham would direct the boys to text or e-mail their nude pictures to a Yahoo! e-mail account that he had created for his Terri Smith Facebook profile. Mooneyham received nude pictures via e-mail from at least three minors and solicited others. The pictures of Terri Smith that Mooneyham sent to the boys depicted an unknown female that Mooneyham had found on the Internet. During the investigation, Mooneyham, posing as Terri Smith, also solicited a sexually explicit photo from an undercover FBI agent, who was posing as a 15-year-old boy on Facebook.

When fashioning his sentence, Judge DeGiusti took into consideration evidence that, while pending sentencing, Mooneyham conspired to hire a third party to murder his wife, a plot which was ultimately foiled. His wife had reported Mooneyham’s Facebook activities to the FBI, which led to his arrest.

Mooneyham pled guilty on August 5, 2011. Upon release from prison, Mooneyham will be on supervised release for five years and will have to register as a sex offender.

This case was part of Project Safe Childhood, the flagship program in the Department of Justice’s National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction, and was the result of an investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Edmond Police Department, and the Oklahoma City Police Department. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Hale.