The defendant is said to have enticed three girls to perform sexual acts and made them film and photograph themselves.
Court theme image APA / APA / Georg Hochmuth
A 47-year-old was sentenced to eight years in prison in Vienna on Wednesday for a serious case of cyber grooming – the targeted manipulation of underage or minor victims on the Internet with the aim of sexual abuse. From May to December 2024, he is said to have contacted three underage girls online, enticed them to perform sexual acts and made them film or photograph themselves and then send them to him.
The accommodation was also placed in a forensic therapeutic center. The judgment is not final. The man only pleaded guilty to possessing graphic sexual child abuse material – more than 15,000 relevant images and videos were found during a search of his house. He denied the accusation of serious sexual abuse of minors. He also denied a case of sexual coercion – he is said to have threatened a victim to send the recordings to her riding instructor and her family. He now has to pay the victims a total of 6,000 euros in compensation.
Those affected by the attacks were eleven to 13 years old. The accused is said to have found his victims via Instagram. He is said to have posed as a 13-year-old girl named “Fiona”. According to the prosecutor, over the course of regular conversations he gradually gained the trust of the victims, who believed they were dealing with someone their own age. There are said to have been more than 60 such attacks.
He may have specifically searched for young, underage girls on the social platform and contacted them as soon as they started a public, generally accessible live stream. At least that was the case with the first of the three victims included in the indictment.
“I somehow slipped into it,” said the 47-year-old. The man was exposed in January 2025. An undercover Australian investigator approached the Austrian authorities because he was emailed child abuse material from the defendant. In one picture, a sign for the transport company in Innsbruck could be seen in the background. “I can’t remember that,” he said.
The investigators discovered the defendant Amazon-Voucher that he gave to his victims as payment for photos and videos. The arrests took place in July 2025. During a house search, the material made by the girls was found on the accused. The 47-year-old denied this, saying he never pretended to be “Fiona”, but rather that the pictures were sent to him via Telegram by a “Fiona” in the summer of 2024. However, an IT expert discovered that the images had been stored on a USB stick for much longer. The victims were interviewed via video conference in camera.
The defendant has already been in court three times for possession of graphic sexual child abuse material (§ 207a StGB). A psychiatric report obtained by the prosecution during the investigation came to the conclusion that the man had a “solidified pedosexual deviation,” which is classified as a “serious and lasting psychological” disorder. The prosecutor spoke of a “crazy lifestyle” that the defendant displayed. He hardly had any contact with women, sometimes with sex workers. The offenses had a “significant dimension” which the accused downplayed.
The psychiatric court expert Peter Hofmann assumes that the 47-year-old, without treatment and on his own, will soon commit such crimes again with serious consequences. Even a prison sentence didn’t stop him. Shortly after his release from prison, he contacted a person online who posed as a woman who wanted to sell her daughter to men for a four-figure sum. “This is not a problem, but a deep inclination, a drive,” said the expert. The accused has no understanding of injustice, the inclination is simply there. The 47-year-old does not see his feelings as a problem, but rather that he is being ostracized by society and that it could have criminal consequences. Women’s clothing and a jersey belonging to a very young Russian athlete were discovered in the accused’s apartment, which he had purchased and hung on his bedroom wall. “I have a problem with the topic and would like to move away from this topic,” said the 47-year-old. During the therapies he had previously ordered, he did not discuss his pedophile tendencies “out of shame”.
(APA)
