Arizona man sentenced to 12 years for possessing child pornography
May 21, 2019, 8:35 PM
(Arizona Attorney General's Office photo)
(Arizona Attorney General's Office photo)
PHOENIX — A metro Phoenix man has been sentenced to more than a decade behind bars after he pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography.
Marco Antonio Alvarado, 25, was sentenced Friday to 12 years in Arizona prison after his conviction of sexual exploitation of a minor and attempted sexual exploitation of a minor.
The El Mirage resident pleaded guilty in April to the two felony counts involving the “graphic depictions of child sexual exploitation.”
Authorities said Alvarado got the images through file trading on Chatzy, a Canada-based website that hosts private chat rooms.
During a joint investigation, Canadian authorities and special agents from Homeland Security Investigations found that Alvarado posted links to cloud-based storage accounts that contained the graphic images.
Agents based in Phoenix searched his home in 2015 and found deleted graphic images of sexual exploitation on a laptop in Alvarado’s possession.
He told the agents that he would trade the child pornography images and would later delete them.
Alvarado will serve lifetime probation once he is released from prison and will have to register as a sex offender.
