Man admits posing as girl to get nude male photos
A former assistant high school volleyball coach in Ohio has admitted to posing as a teenage girl online so he could receive hundreds of sexually explicit photographs of young boys across at least three states.
Clay Thomas Wolfe, 28, entered guilty pleas on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Columbus to charges of sexually exploiting minors and possessing child pornography.
Federal prosecutors said Wolfe admitted posing as a 15-year-old girl named “Ally” on Snapchat and using pornographic photos of females he found on public social media accounts and adult pornography sites to get middleand high school-aged boys to send nude photographs of themselves to him in return. Wolfe would then “extort the victims by threatening to send the nude images of his victims to their friends and family unless they sent him additional images,” prosecutors said.
In total, Wolfe received about 850 images and 570 videos of child pornography, prosecutors said.
Wolfe is a former assistant volleyball coach at New Lexington High School. His sentencing date has not been set, however, a plea deal reached in the case includes a recommended sentence of between 18 and 23 years in federal prison. According to federal court records, an investigation began in April 2022 in Pittsburgh after multiple sixth-grade boys were caught sharing images of another male student. The investigation determined the students were all in communication with “Ally” through Snapchat.
The investigation traced the Snapchat account, which had been created under a false name, to the Internet provider address at Wolfe’s home in Junction City, Perry County.
A search warrant for Ally’s Snapchat account also resulted in the discovery of multiple saved images of teenage and preteen boys in various stages of nudity. The account had been accessed multiple times at the IP address at Wolfe’s home, federal court records said.
In February 2023, detectives searched Wolfe’s home and seized multiple electronic devices, including a cell phone with “hundreds of images depicting nude age questionable or pubescent males” on it, according to court records.
Wolfe told detectives during the execution of the search warrant that he had used the Snapchat account for “Ally” since at least 2018 and had connected with more than 100 minors online who had sent him photographs. Wolfe said he had received images as recently as the day before the search.
Investigators are still attempting to identify some of the victims, but thus far have been able to identify victims from multiple cities in Ohio, including Chillicothe, as well as places in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, and elsewhere across the United States. The images received by Wolfe were in some instances boys as young as 10 and 11 years old, federal prosecutors said.
Wolfe has been in federal custody since his arrest in June 2023.
bbeuner@gannett.com