“Disgusting extortionist, one of the worst”, “his place is behind prison bars”, “hard to think of anyone who is a greater danger”

It was full of rage at the Belfast court for 26-year-old Alexander McCartney who was sentenced on Friday to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of 20 years.

He is estimated to have targeted over 3,500 children, underage girls he “trawled” over the internet from 2013 to 2019. One of them, at just 12 years old, ended her life. The judicial authorities eventually focused on 70 children to make the trial more manageable.

The victims were 10 to 16 years old and came from Britain, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, in a total of 30 countries.

The list of charges he faced was endless: a total of 185 charges of extortion, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and producing and distributing obscene images of children.

He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of manslaughter and inducing girls under 13 to engage in sexual activity, which included penetration. He was also given other sentences: 10 years for each of 45 counts of varying degrees of seriousness relating to sexual activity with underage girls, six years for each of 29 counts of possession of obscene images and 10 years for each of 58 counts of extortion.

He will not be able to apply for parole before 2039.

His case was one of the largest catfishing (sexual blackmail) investigations in the world, the Guardian reports.

He was arrested multiple times between 2016 and 2019, but continued to break the law despite bail conditions until he was taken into custody. He claimed to police that he was a gambling addict and owed about £1,000. He further claimed that he too had been a victim of catfishing in his teens, although prosecutors found no evidence to corroborate the claim.

In fact, the first time he was targeted by police, in 2016, eight computers, four laptops, eight tablets and nine mobile phones were found at his residence. Indecent images of children were found on four other devices.

A conversation with a 13-year-old girl from Scotland, which took place in 2019, led to the revelation of McCartney and the sheer scale of his blackmail.

The method of blackmail

McCartney, a computer science student, had spread his net from his family home in Northern Ireland. He had dozens of machines that simulated a total of 64 devices with which he spoke to his victims.

He posed as a young girl on Snapchat, hanging out with girls who were gay or exploring their sexuality. Initially he tried to approach them with flattery. The goal was to elicit an obscene photo to blackmail them.

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The court stressed that his behaviour was the product of calculation and that he had become increasingly vicious over time. That he targeted girls who were exploring their sexuality “gave him another level of security”, the judges said.

Once McCartney secured a photograph of his victims, he blackmailed them into engaging in sexual acts. In some cases, he required his victims to involve younger siblings, even three to five years old, or their pets.

As far as the court was told, McCartney intimidated and threatened his victims or spoke in a stilted manner. One girl was told he would send people to her house to rape her if she did not comply with his demands. To another, who told him her mother had cancer, he replied “heh……”

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The tragic story of Kimaron Thomas
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Among the dozens of McCartney catfishing victims was 12-year-old Kimarron Thomas, from West Virginia, USA.

Ostensibly as a girl his own age, he complimented the girl, eventually convincing her to send him personal photos. Then the blackmailing began that he would post the photos on the Internet.

Kimaron, like many of McCartney’s victims, said nothing to anyone. Again, the blackmailer kept pushing her, this time from a different account. When she refused to send him a photo he asked for, saying she’d rather kill herself, McCartney set a countdown and told her “goodbye and good luck.”

The girl eventually suicided in May 2018 with her father’s gun after McCartney threatened to send him photos of her.

Three years later, after she was arrested and the electronic devices were recovered from the defendant’s home, authorities discovered the girl had killed herself three minutes after the conversation. She had told him that she was very upset, that she was going to go to the police and end her life. But he replied that he didn’t care and set a countdown for her to send the photos. Her body was found by her nine-year-old sister.

Eighteen months after his daughter’s suicide, Cimarron’s father, a U.S. Army veteran, suicided without ever knowing what led his daughter to end her life.