Locations
Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, CV35
Description
A vile troll who bullied underage girls into sending him naked pictures has been spared jail because he was just 16 when he began his cruel online campaign.
Daniel Crowley, 18, of Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, threatened and manipulated five girls - aged between 12-15 - from across the UK in a year-long campaign of online abuse.
He posed as boys called 'Tom Phillips' and 'Dan' and then forced the victims into sending him naked pictures which he then used to threaten them.
Crowley was finally caught after several schools and colleges across the UK warned pupils about a social media troll targeting young girls.
He admitted four charges of controlling children and causing a child to engage in sexual activity and three offences of making indecent images of children.
Crowley initially pleaded guilty to four charges of controlling children, subjecting them to sexual exploitation.
But Judge Sylvia de Bertodano asked the Crown Prosecution Service to reconsider whether the sexual exploitation charges were the appropriate offences, so they were replaced by four further charges of causing children to engage in sexual activity.
She then allowed him to vacate his pleas to the original offences, and he pleaded guilty to the new charges – after which she gave him a three-year community order and ordered him to sign the sex offenders' register for five years at Warwick Crown Court on Monday.
Judge de Bertodano said: 'You did what young people are very able to do very easily these days, and that is create a lot of social media accounts.
'But what you used it for was to create accounts in different names and to contact girls, and over the year or so this continued, your contact with them became very serious offences.
Judge de Bertodano said: 'You did what young people are very able to do very easily these days, and that is create a lot of social media accounts.
'But what you used it for was to create accounts in different names and to contact girls, and over the year or so this continued, your contact with them became very serious offences.
'These are really serious offences. These children were between 12 and 15, and they were desperately frightened by what you did.
'You cruelly abused them over a year-long period.
'This is the nightmare that parents of teenagers face, that their children can be exposed to this type of behaviour online - and that when we believe they are safe in their bedrooms, they are being subjected to sexual manipulation like this.
'If you were an adult, you would be looking at a sentence approaching double figures. But I have to treat you as a child.
'I have to consider what the benefit of sending you to prison today would be, and I don't think anyone would be protected in the long term if I were to do that.'
The court heard Crowley contacted the girls using fake social media accounts.
Prosecutor Daniel Wright said: 'He asked them to send images of themselves committing sexual acts, and kept them and used them to coerce the girls to send further images.
'He used various identities, sometimes encouraging them to contact other people who were also, in fact, him.
'That enabled him to exercise control over them in a bullying manner, and he also used threats of self-harm if they refused to do as he requested.'
The first girl police spoke to said Crowley contacted her in 2016 and demanded she send him pictures of her in her underwear.
When she did he ordered her to send him more and threatened to kill himself if she refused.
Crowley also sent images of a naked woman to her friends, claiming it was her, he warned her she was 'not safe,' so she sent him a naked picture.
Another of his victims was so scared of him she sent him 50 pictures of herself to him after he repeatedly used threats if she refused.
Crowley even used other fake accounts to taunt her about the naked pictures to make the victim believe the snaps were being widely circulated.
Another girl sent him images of her bare breasts, and he threatened that if she did not send more, he would show them to other people.
Mr Wright said when Crowley was arrested his phone was seized, and on it were a number of downloaded indecent images including ones showing penetrative sex acts with toddlers.
In a victim impact statement, one of the girl's mothers told Crowley: 'You have stolen the daughter I had, slowly and systematically.
'She has shut down from all she enjoyed, and she has also been self-harming because of the torment you put her through.'
Delroy Henry, defending, said: 'What he did was cruel, really cruel.
'It is a sad testament of the technological age we now live in that it was done with such ease.'