Man Who Blackmailed Women Into Abusing Siblings, Children Gets 32-Year Sentence

A 26-year-old man in England was sentenced to 32 years in prison Friday after blackmailing victims into committing child sex abuse.

Abdul Elahi, formerly of Sparkhill in Birmingham, targeted almost 2,000 victims from more than 30 countries to collect images of degrading sexual acts and sell the photos to pedophiles, BBC reported. Some of the women he targeted were blackmailed into abusing their siblings or children.

Elahi admitted 158 charges linked to 72 victims and was ordered to register as a sex offender for life. He will also be subject to an eight-year extension to his normal license period once he is released.

Elahi was described during his sentencing at Birmingham Crown Court as being in a “league of his own” in terms of the scale of his crimes. More than 67,000 indecent images of children had been recovered from hard drives, the court heard.

His victims ranged in age from 8-month-old babies to adults, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

Elahi would pose as a wealthy stockbroker on sugar daddy websites. He preyed on victims who were in desperate need of money or were too young to legitimately be on the sites, offering to pay off debts with Bitcoin.

He would blackmail his victims into abusing themselves, their siblings and children. He would then sell the footage to other pedophiles in the form of "box sets."

Elahi would trick his victims into sending nude or partially clothed images of themselves by promising thousands of dollars for the photos.

To make victims send more pictures, the 26-year-old would threaten to expose the images he had in his possession to the victims' family and friends.

Elahi is believed to have made more than £25,000 ($33,000) from selling the pictures, Sky News reported.

Judge Sarah Buckingham described Elahi as the "very worst type of predatory offender ever identified thus far."

"There is no conceivable way of tracing and destroying all the material you have spread online, causing ongoing distress to your victims," the judge stated during the sentencing. "The abhorrent nature of your crimes warrants an extremely long sentence for the protection of the public."