Northern Irish man convicted of sexual extortion of girls on ‘industrial scale’

A Northern Irish man was given a life sentence on Friday for the massive online sexual abuse of children and blackmail of young girls around the world. Police said one incident led to a 12-year-old American girl and her father committing suicide.

Belfast Crown Court heard that 26-year-old computer science student Alexander McCartney, operating from the bedroom of his family home, groomed victims on messaging sites such as Snapchat and Instagram into believing they were chatting online with a teenage girl of the same age.

He then encouraged them to send indecent images or engage in sexual activity via a webcam or mobile phone, which he then shared with others online and used to threaten the children. He regularly assumed the identities of previous girls he had targeted and sometimes forced his victims to involve siblings as young as three years old in the abuse.

The charges involved 70 victims from countries including the UK, US, Ireland and Australia, but police in Northern Ireland said this was a small proportion of the around 3,500 victims believed to have been targeted in around 30 countries .

“His offending was on an industrial scale… his depravity knew no bounds,” Chief Inspector Eamonn Corrigan of the Police Service of Northern Ireland told reporters after the sentencing.

One of his victims, 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas from West Virginia, took her own life with her father’s gun during online contact with McCartney in 2018 and was found by her nine-year-old sister, the court heard. Their father took his own life in the aftermath of her death, police said.

“We will never forgive and we will never forget the horrific things this predator did,” the father of a New Zealand victim of McCartney said in a police statement.

McCartney, who Judge John O’Hara told the court was guilty of “sadism and depravity”, will be eligible for release in 2039.

McCartney sat with his head down as O’Hara listed his crimes and stood with his eyes closed as the verdict was announced. He was led away in handcuffs. He had pleaded guilty to all charges.

Police said that during their investigation they seized 64 devices containing hundreds of thousands of indecent photos and videos, as well as the fake digital accounts used by McCartney.