The paedophile Cambridge graduate whose list of crimes took 35 minutes to read out
A CAMBRIDGE graduate was yesterday named as one of the country’s most prolific sex offenders after admitting 137 crimes – following an investigation into extreme porn on the ‘dark web’.
Matthew Falder, 28, dubbed himself ‘evilmind’ and ‘666devil’ on the secret forums where he shared indecent images of children as young as 13.
He also distributed images of babies being tortured, encouraged the rape of a four-year-old boy, secretly filmed adults in showers and posed as a female artist on classifieds website Gumtree to blackmail people into sending him naked selfies.
The geophysicist appeared in court to answer 188 charges – spanning seven years – including blackmail, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, voyeurism, causing or inciting sexual exploitation of a child, fraud and encouraging rape. It took 35 minutes to read out the offences. Falder pleaded guilty to 137, relating to victims aged 13 to mid-30s. The rest were left to lie on file.
The prosecution follows a two-year NCA probe, its first successful operation against ‘hurt core’ offending – the use of dark web forums for murder, paedophilia, blackmail and sharing extreme porn. The dark web is a part of the internet that can be accessed only through special servers which hide a user’s location and IP address.
Falder was snared after NCA investigators found him posing as an artist on Gumtree, and brought in GCHQ, the Government’s listening post, to help crack his online ‘anonymising techniques’.
Spies have access to decoding applications that can identify ‘dark web’ users. They use bulk data collection to search for patterns of suspicious behaviour.
Falder, who took a research job at Bir- mingham University last year, became hooked on secret forums where users gained kudos for posting extreme material, behind the back of his long-term girlfriend whom he was seeing while at Cambridge.
He targeted victims who were advertising services such as dog walking online. He researched each victim, looking up their address and their family, before posing as an artist called Liz and offering up to £800 for naked photos, claiming he would use the shots to sketch portraits.
On receiving the images, he revealed how much he knew about their families and threatened to post the images on the social media pages of their relatives or friends.
In this way, he blackmailed victims into posing for further, more degrading images which would be shared on the dark web. Some were forced to film themselves licking toilet seats. Others were made to scrawl the name of the dark web sharing platform he used on to their naked bodies, to prove to other depraved users that he had produced the material deliberately for their pleasure.
Falder would demand increasingly pornographic images, requesting which body parts should be visible.
He told a girl of 15 he would speak to friends in social services and have her disabled brother taken into care if she did not cooperate. Another girl was told ‘Liz’ had suffered a mental breakdown and drawing ‘naked images helps get her through the depression’.
A 14-year-old babysitter was told to record indecent images of children in her care. One count of voyeurism by Falder covers a fouryear period.
Investigators said the paedophile made no financial gain from his activity and acted for the ‘sheer kick’ of sharing his material with like-minded individuals.
Some victims were so trauma- tised they self-harmed or considered taking their own lives. The term ‘ hurt core’ offending was coined by Australian media after the 2015 prosecution of a paedophile who ran dark web sites specialising in sexual torture, murder and mutilation of children. One site was called Hurt 2 The Core.
Falder was arrested at Birming- ham University in June and charged with 188 offences relating to more than 50 victims. He has since been sacked. He will return to Birmingham Crown Court for sentencing in December and faces a maximum penalty of life.
The NCA’s Matt Sutton said the case was the most horrifying he had seen in 30 years of law enforce- ment and Falder’s ‘sole aim was to cause pain and distress’. Ruona Iguyovwe, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said Falder ‘ clearly enjoyed humiliating’ victims.
Cambridge University said it was ‘deeply shocked and saddened’. Birmingham University expressed shock and said the offences were not connected to the institution.
‘Sole aim was to cause pain and distress’