A former doctor in Youngstown, Ohio, was sentenced Thursday to 22 years in prison for trafficking six underage girls for sex.
In February, 53-year-old Albert Aiad-Toss pleaded guilty to seven counts of sex trafficking of a minor and one count of child exploitation after his arrest on July 5, 2019.
According to court documents, Aiad-Toss used the online application Snapchat “to entice, recruit and patronize six minor female victims” to have sex with them. He would give them money, alcohol and a number of items of value, including new clothes, in exchange for sex.
“He specifically budgeted $2,000 per month to be spent on obtaining young girls for sexual exploitation,” officials said in a news release.
The encounters occurred between June 1-29, 2019. Many of them included more than one of the young girls meeting him at the same time at a hotel room in Ashland County, which was approximately 90 miles away from his home in Youngstown.
Albert Aiad-Toss got more than 22 years. (Handout/)
According to court documents, the reason he used a hotel at a different city was to avoid being seen by anyone he knew. He also typically arranged for his victims to use a different hotel door, instead of the main entrance, to avoid further detection.
Surveillance video obtained by investigators on June 15, 2019, shows Aiad-Toss inside a hotel with three juvenile victims. A photograph taken two days later shows him in a vehicle with three underage victims.
U.S. District Judge Pamela Barker, who sentenced him on Thursday, called his scheme “disgusting.”
“I don’t understand how you budget $2,000 a month to do this,” Barker told Aiad-Toss, according to Cleveland.com.
“The conduct is reprehensible,” added Barker, who also issued the former emergency-room doctor a $50,000 fine.
“The sentence today is the culmination of months of hard work by multiple law enforcement agencies to bring this offender to justice,” Christopher Tunnell, Ashland County prosecutor and special assistant U.S. attorney, said in a statement.
“We are sending a unified message to anyone perpetrating crimes against our children that no matter who you are, we will bring every resource at our disposal to bear upon you, and you will be made to answer for your crimes,” Tunnell added.
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