According to an FBI statement, Michael James Pratt, 40, was arrested by Spanish National Police in Madrid on Wednesday. Pratt will be held there until he is extradited to San Diego.
The FBI announced Friday that the founder of the San Diego-based website GirlsDoPorn.com, who had been on the run for the past three years while facing federal sex trafficking charges, was apprehended this week in Spain.
According to an FBI statement, Michael James Pratt, 40, was arrested by Spanish National Police in Madrid on Wednesday. Pratt will be held there until he is extradited to San Diego.
The New Zealander is accused of running the now-defunct website in a 19-count indictment. Sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments are among the charges levelled against him.
Prosecutors say that he and other GirlsDoPorn employees forced hundreds of women to appear in pornographic videos under false pretenses. Most of the videos were shot in San Diego.
Four other people who worked for the website have pleaded guilty to different types of felonies. Ruben Andre Garcia, a porn actor and producer, was given a sentence of 20 years in prison. Theodore Gyi, a videographer, was given a sentence of 4 years in prison.
Federal authorities placed Pratt on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List earlier this year.
“The capture of Michael Pratt shows how the FBI will pursue justice outside of U.S. borders. You can run, but you can’t hide,” said FBI San Diego Field Office Special Agent in Charge Stacey Moy. “Thank you to our dedicated FBI San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force and to our federal and international partners for their work to bring Michael Pratt to justice.”
Prosecutors say that the website’s owners and operators used ads for clothed modelling jobs to attract young women who didn’t know what was going on, including at least one girl under the age of 18. The U.S. Attorney’s Office says that when it was found out that the job involved making adult videos, the victims were told that the videos they were in would only be sent to private customers living outside the country and would not be shared online.
Pratt and his co-defendants are accused of paying other women to pretend to be “reference women” and tell the victims that their videos would not be posted online.
Federal prosecutors said that if the women ever changed their minds about filming or finishing the scenes, the defendants threatened to sue them, cancel their flights home, or post already-filmed footage online.
The FBI says that some of the women were sexually assaulted or forced to do sex acts that they did not want to do.
Authorities say that Pratt posted clips of the women’s videos online to get people to watch the full-length videos. This allegedly brought in more than $17 million in revenue for the website’s owners.
In November 2019, an arrest order was made for him.