SALT LAKE CITY — Police say a Smithfield man helped a 15-year-old girl make money by selling nude selfies of herself online.
Ronnie Dexter Rosario Nagtalon, 31, was charged Thursday in 1st District Court with five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, a second-degree felony, and providing an electronic cigarette to a minor, a class C misdemeanor.
The investigation began Sunday when Cache County sheriff's deputies began looking for a missing 15-year-old girl. While reviewing her social media accounts, “I soon discovered that (she) had been soliciting and accepting money through Venmo and other cash apps to accept payments for nude and pornographic pictures and videos of herself to several people, mostly through Snapchat but also through other social media outlets,” an investigator wrote in a police affidavit.
“I saw 91 transactions, most of which were the names of different men who would send payments to her in different dollar amounts,” the affidavit states.
Investigators also noticed money being sent constantly to Nagtalon and said she sent him money 12 times in April and May totaling nearly $720.
Deputies were able to track down the girl and question her.
“She said that because she did not have a bank account or credit card she could not get the money off of her Venmo account to use. She had an arrangement with Ronnel that she would send him money through Venmo, he would cash out the money, keep some of it for himself — she said he called it gas money — and then he would give her the remaining amount. As an example, I asked her how much money Ronnel would keep if she sent him $100 and she told me he would keep about $20. She said this occurred each time she sent him money,” the affidavit states.
On Wednesday, detectives located Nagtalon and took him in for questioning.
“Ronnel then acknowledged that he had been encouraging and aiding (the girl) in her attempts to sell child pornography online by accepting money from her through Venmo and then purchasing products, such as vapes, to give to her and also taking some of the money for himself for gas money,” according to the affidavit.