Online predator sentenced after major manhunt
LONDON — A British judge sentenced a prolific pedophile to 32 years in prison Monday in what the United Kingdom’s national law enforcement agency described as a watershed moment for coming to grips with technology’s ability to support and spread depravity.
Geophysicist Matthew Falder admitted to 137 offenses, including blackmail, voyeurism and encouraging the rape of a child.
Posing as a female artist, Falder, 29, lured victims into sending him humiliating images, many of which ended up on the dark Web. He approached 300 people worldwide.
In an online post titled “100 things we want to see at least once,” he listed “a young girl being used as a dartboard,” and the production of a video depicting a child’s bones being “slowly and deliberately broken.”
Judge Philip Parker branded Falder an “Internet highwayman,” whose behavior was “cunning, persistent, manipulative and cruel.”
Britain’s National Crime Agency said Falder’s crimes required unprecedented levels of resources to stop. The agency worked with the country’s electronic intelligence agency, U.S. Homeland Security, the Australian Federal Police and Europol to crack the case. At one point, some 100 investigators were involved.
“In more than 30 years of law enforcement, I’ve never come across an offender whose sole motivation was to inflict such profound anguish and pain,” said Matt Sutton, a NCA senior investigating officer. “I’ve also never known such an extremely complex investigation with an offender who was technologically savvy and able to stay hidden in the darkest recesses of the dark Web.”
Falder had been working as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham when arrested by the NCA last year.
He had an account on the Hurt 2 the Core network, an encrypted site on the dark Web taken down by the FBI, which alerted British police. The NCA, the British equivalent of the U.S. law enforcement agency, had little to go on save the online alias “inthegarden.”
“I had no scene, the Internet is a virtual scene. I had no forensics whatsoever, nothing, no trace whatsoever and no witnesses,” Sutton said. “I basically had a needle in a haystack — there are 32 million U.K. males over the age of 18, so I had to reduce that down to one.”