Florida Man Gets 330 Years in Prison for Child Sex Tourism in the Philippines

The man, David Paul Lynch, has been sentenced to 330 years in prison for making videos of his sexual encounters with children as young as 6 in the southeast Asian country, and distributed them through online messaging platforms.

“He used an online messaging platform to send and receive pictures and to arrange travel,” Special Agent Daniel Ward, who heads the FBI’s Fort Myers Child Exploitation Task Force in the Bureau’s Tampa Division, said in the a statement. “Some of his victims were as young as 6 or seven years old.”

“He had no history of being a sexual offender,” Ward continued, “but the child pornography he was sending and receiving online caught the attention of officials at the social media platform he was using. There was no question that these were little kids.”

Lynch, who has two young children in the Philippines, had been regularly traveling to the country since 2005, according to USA Today. Prior to his trips, he facilitated his illegal activity through online communication apps connecting him to individuals from the country, and in one case, the mother of one of his children victims.

It was said in the FBI report that Lynch has produced child pornography of at least three children from the Philippines during his visits there, and had also solicited illegal content via email from his fourth victim.

The FBI then opened an investigation after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip from security personnel of the websites that Lynch frequently visits to post images of children of pornographic nature.

The investigation resulted in his arrest in December 2016 at San Francisco International Airport as he was attempting to board a flight to the Philippines. Simultaneously, authorities uncovered evidence containing dozens of images and videos of child pornography that he produced from his overseas trips.

“The Internet has made it relatively easy for people like Lynch to exploit children overseas,” Megan Buck, a detective from the Sarasota Police Department and one of the members of the task force that arrested Lynch in the airport, said in a statement.

The task force that investigated and arrested the 56-year-old man was made up of members from the Florida police department, including Cape Coral Police Department, the Bradenton Police Department, and the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.

“The sentence he received sets a precedent and really sends a message,” she continued. “The community is not going to tolerate this kind of exploitation of children anymore.”

Lynch’s sentence was imposed by federal Judge Virginia Hernandez Covington in January 2018, which included 12 consecutive terms in prison, including 10 consecutive 30-year terms, two of 20 years, and one 10-year term that followed after his conviction late last year, as said in the report.

On top of his sentence, the judge also ordered the man to forfeit his property at 705 El Dorado Drive in Venice, which is assessed to have a value of $414,000, to the government along with his personal computers and storage devices.