(WFRV) – Authorities in graduate student in Colorado is now being charged with the sexual exploitation of minors in the Fox Valley and cyberstalking.
According to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Wisconsin, a federal grand jury indicted 29-year-old Chandan M. Bhangale on April 7 with one count of cyber stalking and two counts of attempted sexual exploitation of minors from the Fox Valley region.
Officials say Bhangale, a graduate student studying computer science at Colorado State University, is originally from Pune, Maharashtra, India, and is in the United States legally via a student visa. He is alleged to have used popular social media platforms and online messaging to target, groom, and extort minors from the Fox Valley area.
Court records appear to show that Bhangale would gain the victims’ trust and collect personal information about them before inducing them to send child sexual abuse material and using it to blackmail them into meeting more of his demands.
Shots fired in Sheboygan, no victims found
Officials add that Bhangale would tell the victims that if they did not meet his demands, then there would be serious consequences that ranged from sharing the sexual material with the public to death or serious harm to the victims or their immediate family members. It is also alleged that through Bhangale’s manipulation, the victims were corced into engaging in self-harm, cutting their own hair, and producing and transmitting child sexual abuse material.
This case is said to have been investigated by several agencies, including the the Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Denver Field Office, Milwaukee Field Office, and Green Bay Resident Agency), the Appleton Police Department, the Colorado State University Police Department, the Hortonville Police Department, and the Wisconsin Department of Justice – Division of Criminal Investigation.
If convicted of either of the two counts of attempted sexual exploitation of a minor, Bhangale will face a minimum jail sentence of 15 years and a maximum sentence of 30 years in federal prison. He faces an additional up to 5-year prison sentence should he be convicted of cyberstalking.
No other information is available at this time.
