A man who posed as a teenage YouTube star was sentenced to 17 years in prison for coercing hundreds of people across the world, including 180 children, into performing sexual acts on camera.
Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed, 29, was sentenced by a judge in Western Australia on Tuesday, according to court transcripts. He pleaded guilty to 119 charges.
David McLean, assistant commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, described Rasheed’s crimes as “one of the worst sextortion cases in history.” In her sentencing remarks, Judge Amanda Burrows said she could find “no comparable case” in Australian legal history.
Over the course of 11 months, Rasheed used Instagram to gain the trust of 286 victims, some as young as 10, before coercing them into committing degrading sexual acts on camera, Burrows said. She said that Rasheed’s “hostile attitude” toward girls and women was likely influenced by his activity on online forums for “incels,” or men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate.
The offenses were committed between November 2018 and September 2019. In one of the most extreme examples, the court said, Rasheed continued to abuse a victim who was self-harming and threatening to kill themselves.
“The scope and persistence of your offending and the time that you took to engage in it is quite extraordinary,” said the judge. In an email Wednesday, Rasheed’s lawyer, Monica Snowball, noted that the judge found her client to be “genuinely remorseful” and that he had completed a “high intensity sex offender program.”
Australian police were first notified of Rasheed’s abuses on Instagram in June 2019, following a referral from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Interpol, the court said. That September, police raided his home, seized an unspecified number of devices and charged him with an initial offense relating to child abuse. According to the Australian Federal Police, a subsequent investigation identified hundreds of victims from 20 countries, including the United States, Canada and Britain.
In her sentencing remarks, Burrows said chat logs showed that Rasheed posed as an internationally popular 15-year-old YouTube star to initially befriend his victims over Instagram. (The court did not identify the YouTuber and said it was not clear if he was aware of his impersonation.)
In most cases, Rasheed would then message them innocuous questions to make them feel comfortable, before eventually sending sexually explicit questions. He would then blackmail his victims by taking screenshots of their answers and threatening to share them with his victims’ followers unless they sent back sexually explicit images.
“This began a cycle where you gained control over the victim,” Burrows said in her sentencing remarks. An investigation found that Rasheed made 418 video recordings of 102 of his victims, including 72 children, without their knowledge.
Rasheed would conceal his identity by communicating to his victims solely over text, the court found. “You didn’t speak to her with your voice and almost never turned on your web camera,” the judge said in Tuesday’s sentencing remarks. “The victim usually never saw your real face whilst you blackmailed and abused her.”
“The predator, through his facade of being a social media celebrity, manipulated and exploited 286 children and young adults for his own sadistic pleasure. Most of these victims were in their own homes, a place where they should feel safe,” said McLean.
“This type of online exploitation and abuse is devastating and causes lifelong trauma,” he said.
The judge said that after finishing school, Rasheed was “unsuccessful in engaging in relationships with women” and became active in incel communities online. “You began to see women and girls as objects of gratification rather than people,” views that “were likely amplified in certain online communities that you frequented,” the judge said. She also suggested Rasheed was motivated by sexual gratification rather than financial gain.
In a statement in April, the U.S. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children defined sextortion as “a form of child sexual exploitation where children are blackmailed by a person who has obtained nude or sexual images of them. Oftentimes the victim is threatened that their images will be released publicly unless they provide additional sexual content, sexual activity or money.” The NCMEC described sextortion as a “global problem” and said it had received “an overwhelming increase in reports” over the past few years, and noted a particularly dramatic increase in reports of financial sextortion.
In a report last year, The Washington Post found that thousands of teenage boys were being extorted in sexting scams in the United States. The FBI and Homeland Security investigations received reports of online financial sextortion of minors involving at least 12,600 victims — mostly boys — from October 2021 to March 2023. The sextortions resulted in at least 20 victims dying by suicide, it said.
If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.