Abuse material still circulating in ‘dark corners’ of internet as sex predator jailed

And the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) warned that footage of the sexual abuse of his victims is still circulating in “dark corners” of the internet.

Twenty-six-year-old Abdul Hasib Elahi was jailed for 32 years at Birmingham Crown Court on Friday (December 10) after grooming victims to abuse themselves, as well as their own siblings and children, and selling ‘box sets’ of the abuse.

The NCA said investigators were “stunned by the industrial scale of his worldwide offending”.

It said some of  Elahi’s victims were adults, while others were children, with some being as young as eight months old.

Unemployed Elahi admitted 158 charges – all committed between January 1, 2017 and August 7, 2020 – in separate hearings at Birmingham Crown Court this year.

The charges include multiple counts of blackmail, disclosing private sexual films and photographs to cause distress, making and distributing indecent images of children, encouraging the sexual assault of children, sexually assaulting a boy, causing or inciting children to engage in sexual activity, fraud and possessing more than 65,000 indecent images of children (IIOC) – including babies being raped.

According to the NCA, Elahi of Sparkhill, Birmingham even sold the footage of this abuse as ‘box sets’ to other offenders while providing ‘master classes’ to help other online predators avoid detection.

The IWF, the UK-based charity responsible for finding and removing child sexual abuse material from the internet, said it is still finding images and videos of Elahi’s victims.

To date, it has taken action against more than 1,600 URLs containing material featuring children he has targeted. This material is all derived from five or six children known to the IWF and the police.

An IWF internet content analyst said images and videos of Elahi’s victims are still circulating online, with IWF staff working to have them removed.

The analyst said: “We’ve actioned at least 1,600 URLs that feature victims from Operation Makedom (the police operation to bring Elahi to justice).

“In some dark corners of the internet we find images of Makedom victims being requested, and there are also some sites that appear dedicated to hosting images and videos of his victims.

“I can also confirm that we do have instances of self-generated sibling abuse including children of both genders, that are Elahi victims.

“We have some on our URL blocking list, and we do find them via public reports or during proactive work. These are the ones we know about – there may be other unknown or unconfirmed victims’ images circulating too.

“There are a couple of confirmed victims whose images are quite widely spread. We have hashed the images.”

Hashing an image reduces it to a digital fingerprint which can be used across the world to prevent material being shared online.

Elahi masqueraded as a stockbroker or rich businessman on sugar daddy websites and promised payments of thousands of pounds for naked or partially clothed images.

The NCA said he singled out victims who were in debt or too young to legitimately be on the sites and tricked them into sending him photographs.

He also targeted some victims on social media.

Elahi sent fake screenshots of money leaving his account in similar transactions to convince victims.

“As soon as possible, Elahi moved victims onto WhatsApp – which is protected by end-to-end encryption – and away from the websites he met them on,” said the NCA.

“When he received enough revealing images he threatened to expose the pictures to the victims’ families and friends unless they sent more increasingly horrendous photographs and videos.

“Elahi’s horrific offences included forcing victims to abuse themselves in sickening ways, including self-mutilation, blackmailing women to send him footage of them abusing young children and making girls abuse siblings.

“Some of the victims were so terrified they felt they had no choice but to comply.”

The NCA investigation showed there were at least 196 victims in the UK and that he had contacted at least 600 people online in the UK.

Elahi had also tried to contact 1,367 women in the US and there were also victims in 20 other countries, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Elahi systematically categorised all the abuse within cloud storage sites.

“He then sold the content as ‘box sets’ through the cloud and via the encrypted app Telegram making more than £25,000,” said the NCA.

“That resulted in further misery for the victims, with their family and friends becoming aware, and often with more offenders trying to blackmail them again.”

The NCA has been working with international partners to safeguard those identied as being contacted by Elahi .

NCA officers arrested Elahi on December 19, 2018, following an allegation he was blackmailing a 15-year-old girl in the US. His mobile phone and computers were seized and forensically examined.

The complex investigation involved work across multiple foreign jurisdictions, said the NCA. He was charged by the Crown Prosecution Service and remanded in August 2020.

Tony Cook, NCA head of child sexual abuse operations, said: “Abdul Elahi is a depraved sadist who got sexual gratification through power and control over his victims whom he often goaded to the point of wanting to kill themselves.

“He has wrecked lives and families.

“NCA investigators were horrified by what Elahi had done and stunned by the industrial scale of his worldwide offending.

“The effects on the victims in this case will continue throughout the rest of their lives.

“I commend them for their bravery and I urge anyone who is being abused online to report it. There is help available.”

He added: “There are very many offenders like Elahi who mask their real identities with convincing personas to exploit both children and adults.

“It’s vital that parents speak with their children about who they communicate with online and what they share.

“These offences can happen to anyone.

“We thank our international partners especially the FBI for the support given to us on this case.”

Susie Hargreaves OBE, chief executive of the IWF, said: “Appalling crimes like this are becoming more and more prevalent as predatory and cynical abusers find new ways to reach and manipulate victims.

“Elahi is now being made to pay for what he has done, but his victims are still living with a sentence all of their own, with the images of their abuse being shared online after all this time.

“The abuse, for so many, does not go away, and the knowledge the videos and images are still in circulation will cast a pall over them for years to come.

“That we have actioned such a large amount of material relating to such a small handful of his victims is frightening. You have to wonder how much more is out there, and how much abuse those children must have suffered because of him.

“Our analysts are working tirelessly to scour the internet to get this material taken down. Our hashing technology is also helping to reduce the chances that those images will be found on popular platforms.”

The NCA investigation sparked a series of other inquiries into Elahi’s associates and several other men have been convicted.

Sophie Mortimer of the Revenge Porn Helpline said: “This is a long-awaited day for Elahi’s very many victims.

“The Revenge Porn Helpline has been working for two-and-a-half years and has removed 135,000 individual images on behalf of those affected, equalling a 90 per cent take-down rate.

“We hope that every person affected by this feels some small sense of closure, we know that their priority is the removal of this content. We will continue to work in the weeks and months ahead to report this content.”

A second defendant Kirsty Nicholls, 36, of Northolt, Middlesex, also admitted offences.

She knew Elahi from a sugar daddy website and together they admitted two sexual assaults against a child and both admitted making indecent images of the child.

She was sentenced to six years and nine months.

Between January and June this year, 64,278 of the reports the IWF has dealt with have been confirmed to contain ‘self-generated material’ where children have been tricked, groomed, or coerced into abusing themselves on camera.

This material is often filmed in the victims’ own bedrooms, and can be of the most severe sexual abuse. This compares with 40,672 reports which the IWF determined to contain self-generated material in the first six months of 2020.

In a snapshot study in 2020, the IWF identified 511 self-generated child sexual abuse images and videos which were determined to involve siblings who had been coerced into abuse.

This equates to eight images or videos each working day. In 65 per cent of cases, one or both children engaged in direct sexual contact with the other.