MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — A former Hilliard man who worked at a hospital in southern Florida has been arrested and charged for trying to buy underage girls for sex.
According to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the FBI received a tip from a Columbus woman who said 26-year-old Alan Li reached out to her through Snapchat. Li and the woman met in 2021 through a dating website and spent the night together.
Documents say during their time together, they spoke about how she was trafficked when she was a minor.
Li and the woman lost contact until he messaged her on March 12 about helping Li’s friend find young girls. The woman told Li to put her in contact with his friend.
Documents say a man named Michael Chen added the Columbus woman on Snapchat. Chen said he was interested in meeting 8- to 15-year-old girls.
The woman then told the FBI about the conversations and that she believes Li and Chen are the same person.
Additionally, the woman found a man named Alan Li who was working at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach. She told authorities the picture on the hospital’s website is the same Li she met a year ago and who she was talking to over Snapchat.
Authorities learned the woman reached out to the director of security at the hospital to tell them about the conversations she had with Li who also reached out to the FBI.
On March 22, documents say the woman allowed an undercover agent to take over her Snapchat to talk to Li and Chen.
The agent provided Li with a “trafficker’s” phone number, which was just a different number being utilized by the same agent.
The agent spoke with Li and said he wanted to be put in contact with Chen. The two messaged each other several times, with Chen saying he had a 13-year-old girl who he had sex with living with him in Ohio, according to documents.
Chen agreed to buy a 12-year-old girl from the agent for $20,000, documents say.
The next day, law enforcement served a subpoena on Bandwidth, a telecommunications company, for two telephone numbers used by Li and Chen. The numbers belonged to a mobile app called Burner, which advertises itself as a way to get extra phone numbers for a user’s phone while keeping their primary phone number private.
Officials also served a subpoena on Snapchat for records associated with Li and Chen’s Snapchats, which records show both accounts were created from the same IP address and on the same date that the Li reached out to the Columbus woman.
Records also showed Li logged out of his Snapchat account and logged in to Chen’s within a few seconds of each other from the same IP address.
Chen scheduled to meet with the “trafficker” and the 12-year-old on April 12, but Chen canceled. The two did not speak for nearly two weeks.
From April 29 through May 1, Chen and the agent messaged intermittently, texting about what girls are available.
On May 2, the two discussed plans for Chen to buy a 15-year-old girl, but it never happened.
The agent wrote in the report they believe Li and Chen were the same person, engaged in attempted sex trafficking of a minor and the attempted coercion and enticement because of the IP addresses linked with the Snapchat accounts and how quickly the users were logging out from one account to log into another. The agent also wrote that during one of their conversations, Li messaged the trafficker saying “I heard you can set me up with some girls?” and only referenced Chen was prompted by the undercover agent.
Li was arrested on May 12 and charged with attempted sex trafficking of a minor less than 14 years of age, attempted coercion or enticement of a minor.