A security guard at a Wheaton mall has pleaded guilty to meeting a teenage girl online, then taking explicit photographs of her and prostituting her around the region.
Cooper Kweme, 31, of Silver Spring, pleaded guilty to sex trafficking in federal court in Alexandria.
His plea agreement says that Kweme, who was arrested last month, pretended to be in his mid-20s on an online social network where he connected with a 16-year-old girl. The two met in February and Kweme took sexually explicit photographs of her, which he posted online to advertise the girl as a prostitute. He then drove her to have sex with clients throughout Northern Virginia and Maryland, the plea agreement says.
“It is despicable that predators troll social networking sites to lure youth into the sex trade,” Neil MacBride, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement. “We encourage young people and their parents to bring any suspicious activity to the attention of law enforcement so we can catch sex traffickers before they can enslave more victims.”
Court records say he told the girl his account on the site was “an undercover police profile the police used to catch sexual predators.”
Prosecutors said Kweme was running a prostitution business, and court documents say he tried to recruit other girls while on the job as a security guard at the Westfield Wheaton Shopping Center.
