In Great Britain, a man has been jailed for seven years for tricking his girlfriend into performing sex acts online through the use of false identities on Facebook.
Darrell Bingham, 49, posed as an American football player and subjected his 21-year-old girlfriend to a six month hoax, in which he tricked her into performing sex acts using blackmail.
Bingham posed as “Grant,” an American football player, on Facebook, pestering the girl to send him topless pictures. When she naively complied, he began blackmailing her into performing sex acts on herself.
She told her boyfriend, Bingham, about the blackmail, who told her to continue, telling her it might be over soon. One day, he told her he had killed “Grant”, producing fake photographs as proof.
But Bingham wasn’t through with her yet. He then posed as “Chad”, a friend of the slain “Grant”, and continued to blackmail her, saying “Grant” had given him the photographs.
The girl broke down in her office one day over the ordeal. Concerned co-workers called the police, who traced the source back to Bingham.
Bingham has since been convicted of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent and has been sentenced to seven years in prison.
The girl had this to say after the whole ordeal, “I feel betrayed and heartbroken. When I found out it was Darrell I was absolutely devastated. He was the only person I could turn to and that is why it makes this ordeal so hard. He tortured me for six months.”
“From the moment I woke to when I went to bed, it was constant. I was so scared and frightened all the time I just didn’t trust anybody.”
Facebook has been used as a tool of deceit in the past, people posing as someone else to elicit sex or scam people out of money. Recently, a Pennsylvania man was charged with 68 felony counts after tricking underage girls into sex by using fake Facebook profiles to lure them in.
