03/28/2024

Wales News Online

Local & National News for Wales

Maesteg based paedophile who posed as teenage girl to ‘bait’ young victims is jailed

A paedophile who pretended to be a 15-year-old girl to coerce teenage boys to engage in online sexual activity has been jailed for four years.

Jamie Hopes was tracked down by officers from South Wales Police’s Online Investigation Team (POLIT), who traced a graphic Tumblr video showing children engaging in sexual acts, to his IP address.

The team executed a warrant at the Maesteg home the 24-year-old shared with his parents on June 5, 2018 – and were told by Hopes “Yes, I know what you’re talking about, it will be on my mobile.”

Following a search of the address, officers seized a number of devices, two of which were subsequently found to contain more than 50,000 indecent videos and images of children.

The resulting investigation found that Hopes – who was a training sergeant with the Army Cadet Force and also regularly worked at family festivals as a registered door supervisor with the Security Industry Authority – had also shared a significant amount of the downloaded material with fellow online pedophiles.

Further exacerbating his depraved offending, Hopes also kept a file entitled “For Baiting” in which he kept photos and graphic videos of a teenage girl to deceive boys into believing he was a young girl.

Some 40 young victims are thought to have been targeted by his deception, the vast majority of whom were coerced in to carrying out sexual acts on film in the belief that they were sending them to a teenage girl.

Hopes previously pleaded guilty at Cardiff Crown Court to 15 charges including causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, possession of indecent images of a child, distributing indecent images of a child and possession of extreme pornography.

On Friday (October 4) he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He was also made the subject of a 10-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO), which will prevent him from contacting anyone under the age of 18, and impose stringent supervision by police and partner agencies upon his release from prison. He will also remain on the Sex Offenders’ Register indefinitely.

Detective Constable Carl Taylor, an officer in the case said: “Hopes was prolific in his downloading and sharing of indecent images and videos of children, many of which were of the most extreme category.

“This in itself is not a victimless crime – real children will have been exploited and will have suffered in order to make that material; abuse which will have a lasting, lifelong impact on them.

“Hopes, however, went a step further in order to satisfy his depraved interests. He targeted dozens of teenage boys on popular social networking sites, gaining their trust by pretending to be a girl their own age, and grooming and manipulating them into engaging in sexual acts.

“Our team have not been able to identify all of those affected by Hopes’ offending, but of those we’ve managed to trace, all have suffered greatly and the abuse has had a profound effect on them.

“I welcome this sentencing, and I hope it provides those victims with some closure and allows them to begin rebuilding their lives.”

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