A 29-year-old Australian man, who pretended to be a teen YouTube celebrity to prey on children and young adults online, has been sentenced to 17 years in jail.
The Perth man, identified as Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed, coerced 286 victims, including 180 children, from 20 different countries into performing sexually explicit acts on camera or video, the Australian federal police said.
Rasheed pleaded guilty to 119 charges in December last year and was first charged in 2021 when the Australian Federal Police (AFP) reported that he had posed as a teenage social media celebrity to befriend girls both in Australia and abroad.
Australian federal police’s assistant commissioner, David McLean, stated that the man’s “abhorrent actions” and complete lack of concern for his victims’ distress, humiliation, and fear rendered it “one of the most horrific sextortion cases prosecuted in Australia”.
“This type of online exploitation and abuse is devastating and causes life-long trauma,” he said.
“The predator, through his façade of being a social media celebrity, manipulated and exploited 286 children and young adults for his own sadistic pleasure. Most of these victims were in their own homes, a place where they should feel safe,” he said.
On Tuesday, the judge in the district court of Western Australia, Amanda Burrows said the volume of offences was of such magnitude there was “no comparable case … I can find in Australia”.
The man allegedly approached children online pretending to be a teen celebrity with a massive following and asked innocuous questions initially to gain their trust. The court heard that this would then escalate as he would ask them for pictures of themselves he could “rate”.
He then threatened to share screenshots of their responses with friends and family unless they carried out increasingly extreme sexual acts, which sometimes involved family pets and younger siblings or children in their home.
The judge said those offences were “of a degrading, humiliating nature [and] the conduct involving a family pet was particularly abhorrent”.
Mr McLean said there was collaboration between international law enforcement authorities which helped in nabbing the culprit.
“As a result of information provided by Interpol and HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) about an Australian sexually exploiting girls in other countries, the AFP was able to identify this man and stop him from hurting anyone else.
“During the investigation, AFP officers liaised with police in multiple countries to help identify victims and check on their welfare, and passed on intelligence about other offenders who had been in contact with this man.”
Rasheed was sentenced for 665 offences which occurred over 11 months and involved 286 victims.
“The victims will forever live with the fear that the recordings you made of them will be [further] disseminated,” Judge Burrows said.
He is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for a separate crime involving the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old child on two occasions in his car at a Perth park. The judge noted that these offences occurred during the same period as his online crimes.
Rasheed moved to Australia from Pakistan at a young age and his parents were “traditional, conservative and strict”, according to psychiatrists who spoke with him.
He reportedly began accessing child exploitation material online in 2018 which then led to him directly exploiting children in 2019 after the online material “lost its effect”.
If you are a child and you need help because something has happened to you, you can call the NSPCC free of charge on 0800 1111. You can also call the NSPCC if you are an adult and you are worried about a child, on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adults on 0808 801 0331