Father pretended to be teenage boy to trick his daughter into sending him nude photos
He pleaded guilty to receiving and sending child sex abuse images
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Your support makes all the difference.A father posed as his teenage daughter’s boyfriend to trick her into sending nude images of herself and then sexually abused her, a court has heard.
The 41-year-old father could be sentenced up to 250 years in jail, reports Syracuse.
He pleaded guilty to 12 charges including receiving and sending child sex abuse images at Herkimer County Court, New York.
The man, who cannot be named to protect his daughter’s identity, pretended to be a 16-year-old boy and set up accounts on Instagram, AOL and a texting service in September 2013, the court heard.
The pair then began the apparent relationship online, the Utica-Dispatch reports.
The defendant then pressured the girl to send nude photos and, after initially refusing, she eventually gave in. The father then used the images to blackmail her into sending more, threatening to send them to her father if she refused.
In November, the daughter said she did not want to be in the relationship anymore as all he wanted to talk about was “sex and more sex”, reports the Utica-Dispatch.
Following the break-up, the girl received a text message from the supposed boy’s mother, claiming he had killed himself.
The father claimed his daughter's "boyfriend" had sent him the explicit images.
Shortly after, he began sexually assaulting his daughter.
The abuse only came to light when she told her school nurse what was happening.
When police investigated, they found that the text messages had been sent from within the girl’s family home.
“Keep in mind the relationship between the defendant and the victim in this case, which makes this all that much more egregious,” attorney Lisa Fletcher told US District Judge Brenda Sannes.
“It is very emotional,” the father told Judge Sannes. “I’m giving away many years of my life.”
He will be sentenced in July.
Across America an estimated 13 per cent of young people using the internet received unwanted sexual solicitations, according to the National Sex Offender Public’s statistics from the US department of Justice.
The department’s stats show 27 per cent of youths were asked for sexual photographs of themselves.
In addition, the stats show 30 per cent of perpetrators of sexual abuse online are family members of the victims.
The amount of sexual abuse cases reported linked to dating apps has increased sevenfold within two years, according to a freedom of information request. It showed 55 crimes were reported in connection to the apps in 2013, while 412 were reported by October 2015 and included sexual grooming.
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