A 27-year-old man from Birmingham has been jailed for 30 years after posing as a teenage boy online to groom dozens of young girls across the UK.
Bilal Kazi targeted 'young and vulnerable' girls over platforms including Snapchat, Roblox and Wink, using a fake profile picture of an unidentified boy to pretend he was a white British teenager called 'Reece'. Cheshire Police described the operation to bring him down as its largest ever investigation into online child sexual abuse.
Police identify 70 victims
Cheshire Police said its officers identified 180 potential victims through usernames and other data recovered from devices he used. A total of 70 victims, aged between 11 and 17 at the time, were identified across 28 of the UK's 45 police forces. Each one was subsequently visited by police.
Speaking after a sentencing hearing on Friday at Chester Crown Court, police said Kazi would 'quickly groom' the victims into believing they were in a genuine relationship with him before requesting explicit images and videos.
Threats and intimidation
A Cheshire Police spokesperson said: "He manipulated the young girls into believing that sharing such content was a normal part of being in a relationship. His demands would soon escalate, with victims being pressured into recording themselves performing sexual acts.
"When victims refused to comply, Kazi would threaten to share the images and videos they had already sent him. These threats left victims feeling frightened and intimidated, and some continued to engage with him out of fear."
The investigation was taken over by Cheshire Constabulary's Online Child Abuse Investigation Team after one of Kazi's victims reported the abuse she had suffered to the police. She told of speaking with him over Snapchat when she was 13, and said conversations quickly turned 'sexual in nature'. The girl told police he requested naked images and videos from her.
Arrest and sentencing
The force said it emerged at the time that Kazi had left the country. He was arrested on his return to the UK at Heathrow Airport and interviewed. His mobile phone was seized, with analysis revealing the scale of his crimes and the many victims.
Kazi, of Hubert Croft, Birmingham, pleaded guilty to 37 charges of child sexual offences. He was jailed for 30 years and issued a lifelong sexual harm prevention order and lifelong restraining order, and will be barred from working with children.
