Paedophile who posed as pop star on internet to target girls is jailed

The “sadistic exploitation” conducted by Robert Hunter, of Middlesbrough, was so extensive that an international operation through Interpol was sparked.

This came after the 35-year-old had used sites such as Facebook, Skype and MSN to abuse girls as young as nine from across Europe, Asia, Canada and the US.

He would also often pose as the singer Justin Bieber in an attempt to convince the girls to expose themselves and perform sex acts on a webcam. Teesside Crown Court heard that after being arrested in December 2012, he continued to target children and this resulted in a girl from Tasmania eventually contacting police, who traced him back to his home.

In total, more than 800 videos and images were discovered on his computer, all of them having been made by the defendant.

Richard Bennett, prosecuting, said: “Over the course of 2010, 2011 and 2012, Hunter, using a number of online aliases, had pretended to a number of very young girls that he was a teenager. On each occasion he was able to disguise his true age and identity by the clever use of images of young boys or by pretending that his computer wasn’t working properly. As a further demonstration of the naivete and innocence of his victims, he was also able to persuade some that he was the music artist Justin Bieber. He did this to dupe...these young girls to strip on webcams and perform sex acts for him.”

Jailing Hunter for 14 years, Judge Peter Bowers said: “The public will be disgusted by how you have behaved even after you had been arrested and bailed. It represents callous and sadistic exploitation of a number of girls over a number of years.”