A 22-year-old man in the Paris no-go suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis was sentenced to four years in prison after blackmailing underage girls for sex on social media.
A court in the commune of Bobigny sentenced the man on Tuesday after finding him guilty of sexual assault on a minor.
According to a report from the news website Actu, the man had blackmailed his victims, most of whom were underage and Muslim, on the social media app Snapchat. He had threatened to post compromising photographs on pornographic websites unless the young victims gave him more explicit photographs and videos or sexual favours.
The 22-year-old, who worked as an insurance salesman, was arrested in December after demanding a 17-year-old Muslim girl meet him for sex at a Seine-Saint-Denis railway station after threatening to send photographs of the girl to her family.
After being forced to commit a sexual act on the man, the high school girl reported the incident to the police who told her to reconnect with the suspect. She made another appointment at a different railway station just two hours later where police were forced to use a taser on the man during his arrest.
Investigations revealed that the man had at least a dozen similar conversations on Snapchat with other victims, with the lawyer for the 17-year-old stating that the man knew “very well how to blackmail them”.
Last month, a similar case took place in Sweden but involved two men, both Afghan migrants, who were accused of filming sex acts with minors and blackmailing their victims with the footage.
Police were tipped off after some of the videos were spread on social media, leading to the Afghans’ arrests.
Prosecutor Andreas Lennartsson stated that the crimes went on for an extended period and involved girls as young as 13.