An Australian man who posed as a famous teen YouTuber has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for staging what police are calling one of the worst cases of sextortion.
Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed, 29, extorted hundreds of victims in 20 countries and eventually pleaded guilty to 119 charges involving 286 people. Most of the victims were children, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a press release, confirming that Rasheed had targeted at least 180 children under the age of 16.
AFP coordinated the investigation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and INTERPOL to catch Rasheed before more victims could be harmed. Their investigation began in 2019 when police officers in Leon County, Florida, received a tip about a sextortion scammer “posing as a YouTuber,” an ICE press release said. He was first charged in 2020 and faced additional charges in 2021.
The investigation took years, authorities said, because police needed time to identify all of Rasheed's victims. Police sifted through more than 2,000 images on his seized devices and unraveled social media chats across multiple accounts, coming up with 665 crimes involving 286 victims, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported.
According to AFP, Rasheed targeted girls and women with public friends lists on social media and sent them messages convincing them that he was a famous YouTuber.
Once he gained her trust, he bombarded the chat with sexual fantasies and manipulated screenshots of the chats to make it look like the victim had engaged with the explicit messages.
Rasheed threatened to send the doctored screenshots to their friends and then made increasingly dire demands, urging terrified victims to quickly share sexual content by setting a “countdown timer,” ABC reported.
His intention was to humiliate the victims, Australian District Judge Amanda Burrows said in sentencing. Among other things, he forced children to perform “torturous” sexual acts with pets or other small children, ABC reported. He saved the videos and sometimes streamed them live, once for up to 98 adults. Some victims became suicidal, but that did not stop Rasheed's demands, even after the victims shared images of self-harm, police found.
Man shared information from victims in “Incel” forums
In sentencing, Burrows said Rasheed's offences were of a “degrading, degrading nature” and that “the conduct in relation to a pet” was “particularly heinous.” His offences were aggravated, Burrows said, by the fact that he livestreamed the content to other paedophiles.
Rasheed had previously been detained for abusing minors while the AFP's investigation into his sextortion scheme was ongoing. While in custody, he attended a sex offender treatment programme but was found to be at high risk of re-offending.
Burrows also noted in sentencing that Rasheed had “engaged with misogynistic 'incel' online communities – which promote the view that women are inferior and owe men sex,” ABC reported. AFP found that he had “exchanged sextortion strategies” and “shared details about children who were blackmailable and abuseable” with other men in online forums. Information about other offenders who had been in contact with Rasheed was passed on to law enforcement in several countries, AFP confirmed.
The BBC reported that Rasheed could be eligible for parole as early as 2033.
AFP vice president David McLean said Rasheed launched his plan “for his own sadistic pleasure.”
His “heinous acts and callous disregard for the obvious distress, humiliation and fear of his victims made this case one of the most gruesome sextortion cases ever tried in Australia,” McLean said, noting that Rasheed's many victims were likely to suffer lifelong trauma.
The judge agreed that the harm caused by Rasheed's massive plan was enormous and likely endless, and extended Rasheed's sentence to have a deterrent effect on others.
“The victims will live forever in fear that the recordings you made of them [further] spread,” Burrows told Rasheed.
If you or someone you know is suicidal or in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline number 1-800-273-TALK (8255), which will connect you with a local crisis center.