Bilal Kazi, 27, has been jailed for 30 years for grooming more than 70 young girls while posing as a 14-year-old boy online. Kazi used a fake photo and the alias 'Reece' to manipulate his victims into sending sexually explicit videos and images of themselves.
Offending spanned four years
Kazi's victims were aged between 10 and 17 and were targeted through apps including Snapchat, Wink and Roblox over a four-year period from August 2021 to August 2025. A trial at Chester Crown Court heard he made victims believe they were in a relationship with him before pressuring them, even while they were at school, to send naked photos and videos on Snapchat.
He would then threaten to leak the images online, so victims sent more indecent images out of fear, the court heard. Kazi, originally from India, was studying at the University of Chester. Police have said he could have as many as 180 potential victims who have not yet been identified.
Impact on victims
Many of his teenage victims were left with psychological damage, feeling "broken", their innocence taken and teenage years ruined, the court heard. Twice indecent images were leaked online, leaving the young victims suicidal.
Kazi admitted at an earlier hearing to 33 child sex offences relating to 19 victims, including causing a child to engage in penetrative sexual activity, making indecent images of children and six counts of blackmail, between 2021 and 2025. He was jailed for 30 years with an extended sentence of eight years on licence as a judge told him: "You are a very dangerous person."
"Thats the sad feature. He's taken away their childhoods," Judge Steven Everett, Recorder of Chester, told the court. Addressing Kazi, he added: "You took advantage of what appears to me a lack of proper security on social media sites which should have been there to prevent young persons being taken advantage of by sexual predators like you. It is incomprehensible why any person would do what you did to these 19 different young girls and we have no idea how many others. We will never know how many victims have fallen prey to you. You are a very dangerous person."
Investigation and arrest
Kazi told one of his 13-year-old victims that he was preparing her for sex with him, while he told others that sending naked images is what people did for each other if they were in love. The defendant met another teenager on an app called Wizz before grooming her on Snapchat.
Another girl said her "whole world fell apart" when her friends logged into her Snapchat account and found a video she had sent to "Reece", which was shared around her school. The girl lost all her friends, was bullied, fell into severe depression, and took an overdose. Kazi hacked the Snapchat account of another girl and publicly posted on her profile the indecent video she had sent him, which was seen by 93 of her friends. "Before she took it down the damage had been done," Myles Wilson, prosecuting, told the court. The girl's mother found the messages from "Reece" and police were called in, in May 2022.
Kazi, a chemical engineering student originally from Mumbai, was traced, living in Chester but had left the country. He was then arrested at Heathrow Airport in July 2023, when he came back from visiting family in Kuwait and his mobile phone seized. He had been living in Hubert Croft, Birmingham, at the time, and continued targeting teenage girls in the same way while on bail and under investigation.
Cheshire Police said their investigation into Kazi became the force's largest ever online child sexual abuse case, with as many as 180 girls potentially involved, with victims across the UK including in Scotland, Devon, Cornwall, Avon and Somerset. Police say 70 victims, aged between 10 and 17 at the time of Kazi's offending, were identified across 28 of the UK's 45 police force areas.
Kazi was finally rearrested and remanded into custody in August 2025 and police found hundreds of category A child sex abuse videos involving teenage girls, along with 9,000 messages exchanged with one girl alone in the space of three weeks.
Detective Constable Georgia Hughes, of the Online Child Abuse Investigation Team at Cheshire Police, said: "The scale of Kazi's offending meant this was a truly mammoth investigation, requiring significant resources and close collaboration across the force. The girls targeted by Kazi were young and vulnerable. For many, their interactions with him were their first experience of what they believed to be a romantic relationship. His offending has had a profound and lasting impact on the victims. Many lived in constant fear of what he would do if they failed to comply with his demands, and some have carried that fear with them for years."
Detective Sergeant Ross Peel said: "I hope this case demonstrates our commitment to protecting vulnerable people and bringing an end to the sexual exploitation of children. It should also serve as a warning to those who, like Kazi, believe that hiding behind a screen makes them anonymous and untouchable."
