Man convicted of grooming teenage girls online escapes jail
Police said Timothy Storey's case was 'every parent's nightmare'
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A man who groomed girls as young as 12 on social networking sites and watched them strip on Skype has escaped a jail sentence.
MPs and charities branded the sentence “appalling”. The case has been referred to Attorney General Dominic Grieve.
Timothy Storey, 34, posed online as a privately educated teenager and stalked young teenage girls on Facebook, requesting that they sent indecent images of themselves.
He also watched a 13-year old girl strip on Skype and display intimate body parts. Detective Inspector Neal Burton said Storey was “every parent’s nightmare”.
Despite being convicted of eight child sex charges, Storey, who is married to an Oxford educated lawyer and went to private school, received a three-year rehabilitation order, the Daily Mail reported.
The case is likely to lead to fresh scrutiny over the dangers of online sex abuse and the increasing numbers of paedophiles using social networking sites to prey on their victims.
A 14-year-old girl last year told police a man called Tim Stone - Storey’s online alias - had sent her sexual images on Facebook, sparking an investigation.
Officers found Storey had acquired 800 friends on Facebook, all of them girls under 18, the newspaper reported.
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