From the U.S. Attorney:
SUBURBAN CHICAGO MAN SENTENCED TO 37 YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON FOR SEXUALLY EXPLOITING NEARLY 100 CHILDRE
CHICAGO — A federal judge has sentenced a Chicago man to 37 years in prison for sexually exploiting nearly 100 children with whom he communicated on social media.
In 2022, SHAUN HEALY used Snapchat to contact and persuade young girls to create and send him sexually explicit images and videos of themselves.
Healy often posed as a young girl himself to gain his victims’ trust and induce them to produce the sexually abusive material.
He provided graphic, step-by-step instructions to his victims, including the type of explicit conduct they should engage in and how to record and send it to him.
Healy also extorted his victims by threatening to publish the images and videos they sent him if they didn’t produce and send him even more such materials.
In December 2022, law enforcement arrested Healy at his residence in Elburn, Ill., and searched his cellular phone.
Law enforcement discovered a password-protected album on the phone that contained dozens of carefully organized folders of children that Healy had stored from his Snapchat account.
Each folder contained the child’s Snapchat username, image, and a catalog of the sexually explicit videos and images that he instructed them to produce and send.
Healy, 45, pleaded guilty last year to child exploitation charges.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman imposed the 37-year prison sentence during a hearing on Feb. 12, 2026, in federal court in Chicago.
The sentence was announced by Andrew S. Boutros, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and Matthew J. Scarpino, Special Agent-in-Charge of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Chicago. Valuable assistance was provided by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
“Defendant is a child predator,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Saqib Mohammad Hussain and Elly Moheb argued in the government’s sentencing memorandum.
“And not just a child predator, but one who ruthlessly sexually exploited young girls and prided himself on it.
“What defendant made these children do will affect them for the rest of their lives in ways that we cannot appreciate.”
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood (PSC), a nationwide initiative to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse. PSC marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children, while also providing critical services to victims.
If you believe you are a victim of sexual exploitation, you are encouraged to contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by logging on to https://www.missingkids.org/ or calling 1-800-843-5678. The service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For more information about HSI’s efforts to protect children from sexual predators, visit Know2Protect.gov.
