Paedophile Abdul Hasib Elahi has pled guilty to targetting nearly 2,000 women and children — some as young as 8-months-old — in a global online blackmail scheme.

Elahi, a resident of Birmingham, England passed himself off as a wealthy stockbroker on “sugar daddy” websites in order to target victims who were either in debt or too young to complain to authorities after he tricked them into sending him naked pictures.

The duplicitous pervert promised to pay thousands of pounds sterling in exchange for posed photographs, sending faked screenshots of money supposedly leaving his account.

Abdul Elahi would then use the pictures to blackmail his victims, forcing some to engage in self-mutilation for his pleasure, and forcing women to send him footage of them abusing young children and even making young girls abuse their siblings, according to Britain’s equivalent to the FBI, the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The paedophile “systematically categorised” footage and pictures of his victims on cloud storage sites and sold the files to other perverts as “box sets” on the encrypted messaging app Telegram for over £25,000. The NCA noted that this resulted in other predators blackmailing the same victims.

He would also provide a “master class” service to other paedophiles to copy his sadistic tactics.

The National Crime Agency investigation found that there were at least 196 victims in the United Kingdom and that he had contacted at least 600 people online in Britain. Abdul Hasib Elahi also tried to contact 1,367 women in the United States. The NCA said that his scheme extended to at least 20 other countries, including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

He was first arrested in December of 2018 following an allegation that he was blackmailing a 15-year-old girl in the United States. Officers uncovered his online abuse network after examining his phone and computers.

Elahi pleaded guilty to all 158 charges against him, including “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.”

The National Crime Agency’s head of Child Sexual Abuse operations, Tony Cook said:  “The investigation team have been horrified by Elahi’s sadistic depravity and stunned by the industrial scale of his worldwide offending.

“Elahi sought sexual gratification from having power and control of his victims and he’s displayed zero empathy for them.

“He often goaded them to the point of wanting to kill themselves.

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

“Our investigation has sparked a series of other inquiries into Elahi’s associates and there is ongoing work to bring others to justice.”

Sophie Mortimer, of the Revenge Porn Helpline, said that their organisation has been working with the NCA to remove the online content produced by Elahi for the past 18 months.

“We have managed to remove thousands of images but there is more outstanding and this work will continue for many months to come,” she said, adding: “This content is some of the most extreme that the Helpline has ever dealt with.”

“It is not simply nudity or sexually graphic, it is violent, degrading and deeply harmful.

“The impact of the sharing of this content is devastating and life-changing and should not be underestimated.”

The National Crime Agency also revealed that a second defendant, Kirsty Nicholls, 35, of Northolt, Middlesex, admitted to helping working with Elahi to sexually assault a child and making indecent images of the child.

Both will be sentenced on September 9 and 10 at Birmingham Crown Court.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka