Readers are warned that this article contains details of sexual crimes that some may find upsetting.
A Perth man thought to be Australia’s worst cyber predator has been jailed for almost two decades for crimes a judge described as “abhorrent”, “cruel” and “humiliating”.
Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed, 29, was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in jail for sexually blackmailing hundreds of young women across the world.
From the comfort of his bedroom, the Perth engineer preyed on 286 young victims from 20 countries.
He posed as a 15-year-old YouTube star to lure them into his perverted trap then persistently blackmailed them to perform sex acts on camera.
The sextortion spree spanned 11 months from late 2018. Much of it is too disturbing to report.
The victims were mostly teens and the youngest was just 10.
Some were abused in front of a live audience of other paedophiles.
The girls often begged and cried, threatening self-harm in some cases, but none of that deterred Rasheed.
If they complied it only fed further blackmail as the demands became more perverse.
A court was told his diagnosis – coercive sexual sadism disorder – meant the 29-year-old got pleasure from his victims’ suffering.
So prolific were Rasheed’s crimes, it took almost three days to sentence him in the WA District Court.
Judge Amanda Burrows said there were no cases to compare it to in Australia, describing his conduct as “abhorrent”, “cruel” and “humiliating” with “devastating lifelong consequences” for his victims.
Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner David McLean said the “scale of the predatory and exploitative offending” made it “one of the worst sextortion cases in history”.
“Sextortion can escalate in a matter of minutes,” he said.
“We encourage parents and carers to speak to their children regularly about their online activities, so they feel comfortable about asking for help if needed.
“We also want to remind people to never share personal information with people they have only met online.”
In an investigation launched in September 2019, the AFP and WA Police Force worked with the United States’ Homeland Security Investigations, Interpol and police in several other countries
“One Canada-based victim told police she was just 13 when someone she thought was a 15-year-old social media celebrity contacted her online,” the AFP said, in a statement.
“Instead, it was the Perth man, who asked her a series of sexually explicit questions before sending edited screenshots of the conversation that depicted the victim liking his sexual fantasies.
“The offender then threatened to send these doctored images to her friends and family unless she complied with his demands for sexually explicit videos.
“On some occasions, the man forced victims to perform sexual acts on camera for the viewing of himself and other unknown individuals, in one instance it was as many as 98 other people.
“He also conversed online with other child sex offenders, swapping sextortion strategies, as well as details of children who were susceptible to blackmail and abuse.”
The AFP first charged the man in September 2020 and laid more charges in 2021 as officers combed through thousands of pages of jumbled text conversations from his various social media accounts.
He pleaded guilty in December last year to 119 charges that covered more than 550 incidents across 11 months.
The charges included 55 counts of using a carriage service to cause child pornography to be transmitted to self 33 counts of causing a child outside Australia to engage in sexual activity, 15 counts of use carriage service for sexual activity with a child under 16 and seven counts of sexual coercion.
The AFP said his victims came from Australia, the US, the UK, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Guam, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Namibia, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Panama, South Africa, Spain and the Netherlands.
