Since 2007, a 42-year-old Australian man has been masquerading online as Canadian singer Justin Bieber – a heartthrob among tween girls – to seduce more than a hundred children around the globe into sending him lewd images, according to authorities in Queensland.
The man, previously identified as Queensland University of Technology law lecturer Gordon Douglas Chalmers, was charged this week with a total of 931 sex offenses against at least 157 children, according to news reports and a statement by Queensland police.
Police warned “Justin Bieber fans and their parents” to be “extra vigilant when using the internet.”
“This investigation demonstrates both the vulnerability of children that are utilizing social media and communication applications and the global reach and skill that child sex offenders have to groom and seduce victims,” Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said in the police statement. “The fact that so many children could believe that they were communicating with this particular celebrity highlights the need for a serious rethink about the way that we as a society educate our children about online safety.”
The crimes involved at least 157 alleged victims, police told the BBC, including 50 from the United States, six from Australia and 101 from other unidentified nations.
Rouse called the “breadth of offenses” in the case “frankly horrendous.”
The charges came after a lengthy investigation that began last year, when German federal police and U.S. homeland security investigators passed a tip about Chalmers’s alleged activities to Australian authorities. Queensland police raided the man’s home in November 2016 and found he had been using Facebook and Skype to target children around the world, officials said at the time.
Prosecutors told a judge in November that Chalmers’s Skype account had 123,000 conversations and 6,000 contacts that were “majority” children.
He was initially charged in November with possessing child exploitation material, accessing child pornography and procuring children, reported Australian Broadcasting Corp. Chalmers faced additional charges after he refused to give authorities access to his computer, claiming there was privileged work information on his hard drive.
The new charges announced this week include additional counts of crimes he has already been accused of but allege that Chalmers also committed rape, according to the statement from Queensland police.
Chalmers is scheduled to appear in court in April, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post
