Ex-soccer coach-referee from Huntington Beach pleads guilty to child porn charge

A Huntington Beach man who served as a referee and coach in the American Youth Soccer Organization pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal charge, admitting that he hid a camera in a location where he knew an underage girl in his care would disrobe and persuaded a second child in a foreign country to send him nude photos of herself.

Mark Phillip Oster, 64, entered his plea in Los Angeles federal court to a single count of production of child pornography. Sentencing was set for Nov. 25, at which time he faces between 15 and 30 years behind bars, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In his plea agreement, Oster admitted posting images of child pornography to a website on the dark web dedicated to sharing images and videos of child pornography and to the discussion of child sexual abuse.

On the site, he shared his knowledge of how child pornography is produced in the Philippines and explained how sexual exploitation of children operates in Southeast Asia, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Oster was also found to have shared child pornography on Facebook and Skype and stored child pornography in his Google Photos, a court document states.

He also produced child pornography involving an underage victim who was within his “care, custody, and control’’ at the times of the offenses, according to his plea agreement.

Specifically, on hard drives seized by the FBI from his home in March and August 2021, he possessed numerous images of child pornography he produced with the girl, who was younger than 12 years old at the time, federal prosecutors said.

In addition, throughout 2020 and continuing until July 2021, Oster produced child pornography by “enticing, persuading, and directing” a second child, who was about 13 years old and lived outside the United States, to take pictures of herself and transmit them to the defendant, according to federal prosecutors.

Oster admitted to also having “persuaded and enticed the second victim’s mother to take pictures of her daughter’s body. In exchange for the pictures, Oster sent money and gifts to the child and her mother. The girl was “vulnerable on account of her poverty,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Oster was associated with AYSO from 2015 through 2021. He was named in a four-count federal criminal indictment filed in August 2021, charging him with two counts of producing child pornography, one count of distributing child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography.