Prolific paedophile who blackmailed victims locked up for 32 years

ONE OF Britain’s most prolific paedophiles, who blackmailed a string of vulnerable victims including a girl who was ordered to eat dog food, has been jailed for 32 years at Birmingham, Crown Court.

University lecturer Dr Matthew Falder admitted 137 offences, including voyeurism, encouraging child rape, and sharing images showing the abuse of a newborn baby, after being caught by an international inquiry led by the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The 29-year-old Cambridge graduate was arrested in June last year after four traumatised victims, who were tricked into sending him humiliating images, threatened or attempted to end their own lives.

Sentencing “warped and sadistic” Falder for “a tale of ever-increasing depravity”, Judge Philip Parker QC said: “As for your equally extraordinary sexual offending – no-one who knew you, above ground, had an inkling of what you were doing below the surface.”

Branding him an “internet highwayman” who targeted 46 victims, he added: “You wanted to assume total control over your victims. Your behaviour was cunning, persistent, manipulative and cruel.”

The University of Cambridge, which said it had been “appalled” at the crimes, is now looking at stripping disgraced Falder of his academic qualifications, in a “rare” move for the 809-year-old institution.

A previous hearing was told that Falder coerced male and female victims into producing “increasingly severe self-generated indecent images of themselves, the focus of these images being to humiliate and degrade”.

Falder, of Harborne Park Road, Birmingham, committed his offences over nearly 10 years, manipulating victims “behind a computer screen” by duping them into providing nude images and personal details.

On his arrest, the former postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in geophysics at the University of Birmingham quipped with officers that the list of then suspected offences sounded “like the rap sheet from hell”.

Falder’s long-term girlfriend is said to be “standing by” him, according to his barrister.