Sextortion scheme nets Toronto man 33 years in U.S. prison
· Toronto Sun
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A 40-year-old Toronto man was sentenced in the United States to 33 years in a federal prison for his role in a “prolific” sextortion scheme that targeted more than 100 American children.
The conviction was announced Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia after Ramanan Pathmanathan pleaded guilty in January to one count of production of child pornography and one count of coercion and enticement of a minor.
“This defendant spent years methodically hunting children online,” U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a news release . “He targeted more than 145 victims, some as young as six, and subjected them to horrors no child should ever experience.”
Accused serving sentence in Canada
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Pathmanathan will serve his U.S. sentence consecutively to one he is serving in Canada after being charged by Toronto Police in 2021 with dozens of offences that included child luring, making child pornography and extortion.
It was unclear how those charges were resolved; American officials, however, said he is currently serving a 12-year sentence in Canada after pleading guilty to similar offences on Oct. 27, 2022.
Pathmanathan will serve out his sentence in Canada before being turned over to the U.S. Marshals to do his time there.
Chief Judge James Boasberg, who oversaw the U.S. case against Pathmanathan, also ordered him to serve a 10-year supervised release and register as a sex offender after his U.S. sentence is served.
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At least 145 kids targeted in U.S.
Pathmanathan was convicted after he used multiple social media accounts, mostly on Instagram or Facebook Messenger, to contact dozens of boys and girls across the U.S. while posing as a teenage boy from New Jersey, court documents said.
At least 145 children were contacted in this manner between March 2014 and March 2021, documents said.
The documents said Pathmanathan demanded that his victims engage in “sexually explicit conduct” during video chats with him, including exposing their genitals and engaging in sexual acts with dogs, siblings and other relatives.
“In almost all the video chats with his minor victims, Pathmanathan sent the children images of adults engaged in sexual acts to show them how to do what he was requesting,” documents said.
The document said that Pathmanathan also recorded his victims during those chats and saved the files on a computer. He would then threaten to send images to the victims’ friends of family if they refused to continue interacting with him or blocked his social media accounts.
“The United States will not allow international borders to serve as a refuge for those who prey on children and I am grateful to our Canadian partners for ensuring this predator faced justice on both sides of the border,” Pirro said, specifically thanking Toronto Police and the Ministry of the Attorney General for their help.