Man who used coffee shop Wi-Fi to advertise child abuse material jailed for life

The manager of four dark web sites dedicated to sharing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been sentenced for his crimes and will most likely never get out of prison.

Following a guilty plea, Louis Donald Mendonsa, 62, of Sacramento, will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars for managing multiple dark websites that distributed and advertised child pornography.

One of these sites lets users post images of children as young as infants and toddlers who were being sexually abused.

While using public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, Mendonsa was discovered advertising and distributing child pornography while also engaging in the exchange of indecent images depicting children.

When his devices were searched, law enforcement found roughly 6,500 images of children being abused.

While it wasn’t revealed what classes these indecent images fell into, it does show that Mendonsa wasn’t simply a manager of these sites but was engaging with the illegal content himself.

The sites were in operation for about a year, from December 2021 until his arrest in November 2022.

Mendonsa pleaded guilty to several counts of distributing child pornography and one count of possession of CSAM and is expected to spend 24 years in federal prison.