A pedophile who posed as Justin Bieber online to lure young girls into performing sex acts on camera has been arrested and jailed for 14 years, in a case that the courts have called one of the most serious online crimes they've seen in years.
Authorities said 35-year-old Robert Hunter of Middlesbrough employed "sadistic explotation" against girls as young as nine years old worldwide.
An international probe through Interpol began as a result of Hunter's crimes, the Guardian reported.
Hunter used a number of online aliases on Skype, Facebook and MSN to talk to children, usually claiming he was Bieber to convince the girls to take off their clothing on a webcam.
After being arrested in December of last year, Hunter continued finding young girls online, authorities found out once a girl from Tasmania, Australia, alerted them that she'd been approached in the Internet by the pedophile.
Police traced his online activity back to his home computer, where they unearthed more than 800 videos and pictures that he had made.
"Over the course of 2010, 2011 and 2012, Hunter...had pretended to a number of very young girls that he was a teenager," prosecutor Richard Bennett told the Guardian. "On each occasion he was able to disguise his true age and identity by the clever use of images of young boys or by pretending that his computer wasn't working properly. As a further demonstration of the naivete and innocence of his victims, he was also able to persuade some that he was the music artist Justin Bieber...in order to dupe and encourage these young girls to strip on webcams and perform sex acts for him."
Hunter additionally blackmailed some of his victims, threatening to make recordings of these webcam sessions public.
Judge Peter Bowers reported that the "sadistic" case was one of the worst he'd seen in years.
"This is one of the most serious cases of Internet abuse that the courts have dealt with," he said. "It's a warning to all parents of teenage children of what can be done via the Internet. The public will be disgusted by how you behaved even after you had been arrested and bailed. It represents callous and sadistic exploitation of a number of girls over a number of years."
