A Penn Hills man charged in 2021 with extorting young girls in several states into sending him sexually explicit pictures and videos of themselves has been charged again with production and distribution of those images and has indicated he will plead guilty later this month.
The Pittsburgh FBI had arrested Kaung Myat Kyaw, who lives on Jefferson Road, in November 2021 in relation to a phishing scheme on Snapchat that victimized teen girls in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Virginia.
He had been charged with coercion of minors from September 2020 through November 2021, but prosecutors said at the time that the investigation was ongoing.
A federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on Tuesday handed up new counts related to the images Kyaw is accused of collecting from his victims.
Kyaw indicated on Monday that he will plead guilty on March 22, but it’s not clear if he still intends to do that considering the new counts.
The case against him spans at least three states.
It began in August 2021 when Pittsburgh agents learned that law officers in Fairfax County, Va., and in Buffalo were investigating someone using the names “savnxh,” “jokerxkris” and other identifiers on social media who was involved in the “sextortion of minor victims” across the U.S. and abroad, the FBI said.
In Virginia, police said a 16-year-old girl reported in September 2020 that someone was extorting her for sexual images she had on her phone.
She communicated with “savnxh” but blocked the account. Soon after, “jokerxkris” contacted her and threatened to distribute sexually explicit images she stored on her phone to all of her social media contacts unless she sent him more nude images. He also demanded that she record herself masturbating and send the videos to him. She did and sent him 20 videos of herself.
Similar scenarios played out in Rochester, N.Y., where a young girl said someone named “krxs.com” hacked her Snapchat account and gained access to nudes she had in a file called “My Eyes Only.”
Krxs.com told the girl: “I hacked your nudes. If you block me, I will send them to everyone even your friends from school. I will post them on the internet along with you social infos. If you do not want that to happen, you have to make a deal with me!”
He said he liked being in control and likened himself to Batman’s arch-enemy, the Joker.
“U know the joker, im a psychopath like him but a perverted one,” he said.
Krxs.com and the other similar monikers all led back to Kyaw in Penn Hills.
The FBI raided his house and arrested him, and he’s been in custody ever since as a danger to the community and a flight risk.
In an interview with the FBI, he said he had learned to hack Snapchat from someone else online and agreed to provide his conspirator with images of nude girls. He would send a fake Snapchat message to a girl, saying there was suspicious activity on her account. To reset the account, she had to provide her passcode. Once she did, he was in and could access her images and videos.
He told agents that he provided images to his conspirator, knowing that person would use them to extort more girls into sending images or videos of themselves in sex acts.
In exchange, Kyaw said the conspirator would send him new images that he received.
Among his victims was a 16-year-old from Collier whom agents discovered after searching Kyaw’s iCloud account. He had stored a script purportedly from the “Snapchat Support Team” telling users their account had been hacked and how to reset the passcode.
The girl in Collier had received a text that included that script.
Kyaw will be arraigned on the new charges next week in U.S. District Court.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
