Online Predators

Shocking Story From Canada **** GRAPHIC CONTENT ****

Boyish, cunning and cruel: Online predator shut down

A young man with an ‘amazingly complex’ system, Mark Bedford faces a lengthy prison term after pleading guilty to extortion and child pornography-related charges, writes Bruce Ward.

How a beguiling blackmailer from Kingston coerced hundreds of young girls into performing acts of degradation, live and online. A story of lost innocence and misplaced trust.

Mark Bedford looks about 16 and is boy-band handsome, like Donny Osmond in his Puppy Love days or maybe Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller.

But Mr. Bedford is 23. He is a cunning and cruel online predator whose pitch perfect impersonation of a teenage girl fooled hundreds of girls in Canada and Britain. Several girls, including one 10-year-old, were coerced into performing degrading sexual acts in front of their webcams after being duped by Mr. Bedford.

He now faces a harsh prison sentence after pleading guilty to 10 extortion and child pornography-related charges last week in a Kingston courtroom.

The court heard how two sisters, 11 and 13, were blackmailed into performing mutual oral sex on a webcam.

In a particularly disturbing episode, a 12-year-old girl was twice made to simulate sex with the family dog. It happened at Christmastime, in the same room where the family’s decorated tree was set up. Most of his victims were girls between nine and 15 years old.

“In some instances,” a court document says, “the chat material discloses a very desperate young female pleading with Mr. Bedford to simply leave her alone or asking him frantically why he is doing this to her. Mr. Bedford cultivated the fear of exposure to parents and friends. He manipulated the young women to either demonstrate his control over them or to exploit them … in order to satisfy his own sexual needs.”

Clusters of victims were found in Kingston, where Mr. Bedford lives with his parents, and in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. Other groups of victims were located in Alberta and British Columbia. And at least 40 girls living in Kent, England, were ensnared by Mr. Bedford’s schemes.

The case is chilling in that it shows how the generation born after 1990 is utterly confident online, speaking in teen shorthand and acronyms and bouncing from chatrooms to podcasts. It is this high-tech savvy, mixed with girlish innocence and misplaced trust, that makes some of them so vulnerable to pedophiles.

Authorities involved in the case describe Mr. Bedford as “meek and mild … a very reclusive type of individual who kept to himself.”

Yet when he logged on to the Internet, Mr. Bedford showed an impressive creativity - particularly in the guise of 15-year-old “Samantha,” who, on one social networking site, listed her interests as “singing, dancing (not in public), computer, MSN, Yahoo, Tyler, my b/f …”

As “Sam” — the fake photo shows a girl with long, blond hair — he affected an air of girlish angst. Every pronouncement came with a fusillade of the F-word: ” F…… Christ! I f…… love him so much, you all know who I’m talking bout right. Well you should I talk about him enuf. But damn, that boy. Wow. I dunno wut to even say.

“Christ I get so mad at myself lately, I hate myself, my body, my mind, how lame I am. Why, why couldn’t I have a better social life … I don’t get it.”

Mr. Bedford had the con man’s knack of eliciting vital information through a series of seemingly harmless questions asked during his online chats with girls — What’s your favourite colour? What bands do you like? Do you have a pet? What’s its name?

Unwittingly, some girls would supply significant clues so that Mr. Bedford could figure out the password to their Internet account. He would then hijack the account, change the password, and pose as the victim to her circle of online friends, which sometimes numbered in the hundreds.

Once he had gained a girl’s trust, the online conversations became increasingly sexual in content. Some victims were persuaded by Mr. Bedford to show their breasts as they stood in front of a webcam. He then “captured the webcam images for his own use,” a court document states.
He would then threaten to e-mail those images to the girl’s parents and friends or post them on the Internet — unless the victim agreed to perform sexually explicit acts.

Most of the crimes took place in the fall of 2005 and the following spring, while Mr. Bedford was a computer sciences student at St. Lawrence College. He had a string of online aliases, including “supalover666″ and “ratemybody.” Sometimes he posed as a sexually adventurous young man from “Kingston, Alabama,” eager to show off his body.

Fittingly, it was the RCMP’s centralized databanks in Ottawa that led to Mr. Bedford’s downfall.

Mr. Bedford’s involvement in the crimes was discovered after investigators from England, the Ontario Provincial Police and municipal police forces in Alberta and British Columbia gathered at the RCMP’s National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre to share information from the various investigations. He was charged in July 2006.

“It was an amazingly complex little system,” said Ross Drummond, the assistant Crown attorney who prosecuted the case. “It became apparent that they were all looking at the same e-mail address as the source.

“We found out that this Kingston address was doing all these … and that’s where it all came together.”

Rosalind Prober, president of the children’s rights group Beyond Borders, describes the girls in the Bedford case as “compliant victims.” She compares them to seniors who willingly write a cheque because they fall for a con man’s spiel. Calling a man like Mr. Bedford a predator “doesn’t ring any alarm bells” with young teenagers, said Ms. Prober, whose volunteer group campaigns for Internet safety.

“We call them everything except really nice, handsome, young-looking hot guys, which is how they seem. Children are doing sexual acts because they have been conned. They really don’t see anything wrong with lifting their blouse or whatever. Then they get hit with the double whammy of the blackmail and they’re trapped.”

Men who use the Internet to satisfy their sexual interest in children seek out others with similar proclivities to boast about their crimes, she said.

“They get validation from each other and their little nest egg of pictures is like currency. Those who have the hottest, or the latest, or the most specific are the big shots online.

“It’s need driven, it’s a compulsion. … That’s how insidious it is, that’s how clever they are. It’s all about sexual gratification. It’s not about anything else.”

OPP Det. Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt, the provincial co-ordinator for strategy concerning illegal Internet activities, often uses what he calls the hallway test when he talks to students about Internet safety.

“If there are things you would feel uncomfortable doing in your school hallway, why would you do it on the Internet?” he asks. “Especially when you don’t know because you can’t normally see who you’re talking to.

“It just totally amazes me when kids are on Facebook and those social gathering networks, how much personal information and photographs they post on these sites of themselves.

“I often ask kids, why do you do that? They say, ‘You know, it’s for my friends.’ My response is, ‘If they are your friends, they already know what you look like, they know where you live, they know how old you are.’

“You’re really just putting seeds out there for people who are preying to find you. As easy as you can put it out there, they can take it down and use it for purposes you wouldn’t want them to use it for.”

He also warns parents not to use the computer as “an electronic babysitter” until they get home from work. And he believes it’s unwise to allow teenagers to have computers in their bedroom.

“It amazes me how many people let kids have video cameras and phones and computers in their bedroom away from everybody else. How can you possibly see what they’re doing? People are leery about letting their kids go to the movie theatres. They need to be just as cautious with their kids going on the Internet.”

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