Three men have been sentenced for their involvement in an online catfishing scheme to sexually exploit underage boys for years, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Andrew Wolf, Kray Strange and Patrick Knauss over a period of more than two years, operated an elaborate online child exploitation catfishing scheme to entice minor boys to self-produce sexually explicit images and send them to the defendants over the internet, officials said.
At the time, Wolf was in his 18th year as a middle school teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia, the U.S Attorney's office said.
Knauss, 35, of Essex Junction, Vermont, was sentenced on Tuesday, Oct. 22, to 265 months’ imprisonment (over 22 years), 15 years of supervised release, $3,000 in restitution and a $300 special assessment for child pornography offenses, officials said in a news release.
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Knauss was charged by indictment in February with one count each of conspiracy to manufacture child pornography, conspiracy to receive and distribute child pornography and receipt of child pornography. He pleaded guilty to all three charges in June.
Wolf and Strange both pleaded guilty to the catfishing scheme in June of 2022.
Wolf was sentenced in February of 2023 to 466 months’ imprisonment (over 38 years) and five years of supervised release.
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On March 31, 2023, Strange was sentenced to 396 months’ imprisonment (33 years), to be followed by lifetime supervised release.
They were ordered to pay a total of $324,320 in restitution to six minor victims who sought restitution.
The three targeted boys with large social media followings, as well as dozens of Wolf’s own middle school students. Throughout their years of near-daily communications, which amount to nearly 2,000 pages, the defendant and his co-conspirators also discussed their shared sexual interest in children and traded images and videos of child sexual abuse material, according to officials.
“For more than two years, Patrick Knauss took part in a scheme that victimized dozens of children,” said U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Romero. “Knauss not only encouraged his co-conspirator, teacher Andrew Wolf, to catfish his own students, he even suggested some strategies for doing so."
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