According to Tampa Police Department, a Florida woman is being accused of child sex abuse after police say she posed online as a home-schooled student to lure in a teenage boy.
Alyssa Zinger, 22, is charged with two counts of lewd or lascivious battery and five counts of lewd or lascivious molestation by a defendant over 18 of victim aged 12 to 15.
Tampa authorities claim that Zinger communicated with the victim primarily through social media and that there are believed to be several other victims.
“It is disturbing and unsettling to see an adult take advantage of a child and prey on them,” police Chief Lee Bercaw said in a press release. “Anyone who may have been a victim of Zinger’s, we encourage you to come forward. The Tampa Police Department will support you and ensure a predator like Zinger doesn’t cause you or others additional harm.”
Zinger pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and was released on a surety bond on Nov. 24, the day she was arrested.
Zinger met the victim in May and communicated with him via Snapchat. The victim supposedly believed Zinger was 14-years old.
The victim told authorities that they had met up and had engaged in sexual activities approximately 30 times from May until mid-September.
The allegations that led to Zinger’s arrest are outlined by Detective Amanda Baranowski in the affidavit in support of a search warrant she submitted to a Hillsborough County judge.
In her affidavit, Baranowski writes that she started investigating the case in October after multiple minors told police that Zinger sent them a video of the aforementioned underage boy allegedly engaging in “sexual intercourse” with a minor female.
The minors who received the video told police that Zinger sent the video from her Snapchat account, and that they believed Zinger to be near their age and homeschooled.
The victim told police that he and Zinger had been physically intimate, which included willfully performing sexual acts on each other, and then corroborated this information by showing several photographs and videos.
During this time, Zinger also allegedly sent “sexually explicit photographs and videos of herself” to the victim through Snapchat and said that she engaged in “sexual activity with other minors” both before and during her time with the victim.
The victim also told police that after he and Zinger stopped having a sexual relationship, he and a minor female engaged in “a willful sexual act” in early October, and that the minor female had a recording of this on her phone.
The minor female told police that a few days later, Zinger came to her home claiming she needed to charge her phone and then proceeded to film that video off her phone, which police said is the same video she later sent out on Snapchat.
Police also said that the minor female caught Zinger filming the video from her phone, at which point she was forced out of the home.
Zinger has a past criminal record. She was arrested for shoplifting in July and lied to the police by telling them she was born in 2009.
Zinger is being represented by lawyer Daniel Fernandez and is awaiting her trial.
