Kurtis Whaley child porn: Sydney man sentenced to 6 years’ jail for ‘sextortion’ of 49 boys

A young man from Sydney’s northern beaches who posed as a 16-year-old girl online to catfish and blackmail boys for porn will spend at least six years in jail.

• Man tricked boys into online ‘sextortion’ plot for years
• Catfishing victims want dating trap criminalised

A young man from Sydney’s northern beaches who blackmailed teenage boys for online child porn will spend at least six years behind bars.

Kurtis Whaley pleaded guilty to 54 child porn offences stretching from June 2014 until his arrest in February last year, which he now says “makes me feel sick.”

The 24-year-old Manly Vale man was sentenced to a maximum of nine years and six months prison at Downing Centre District Court on Tuesday, with a non-parole period of six years and four months.

Judge Ian Bourke SC said Whaley appeared to enjoy the “sadistic victimisation and exercise of power” involved in exploiting vulnerable children “to satisfy his perverted sexual desires.”

Whaley preyed on boys in their early teens.

Whaley posed as a 16-year-old girl.

Posing as a pretty 16-year-old girl, Whaley saved ‘temporary’ Snapchat and Instagram photos and secretly recorded Skype and Omegle live streams of naked boys, collecting 700 videos and images of 49 victims aged between eight and 15.

Many of Whaley’s 49 child ‘sextortion’ victims cried and pleaded for him to leave them alone, but his pursuit of them was “cruel and merciless”, Judge Bourke said.

Using the pseudonym of ‘Beth’ under multiple fake social media accounts, Whaley tricked the boys into swapping ‘nudes’ which he later used as leverage, the judge said.

Whaley soon demanded they perform degrading acts beyond their sexual maturity and if they refused he threatened to share explicit footage with their friends and family – once sending an intimate image to a victim’s mother and nine-year-old sister, court documents show.

“You’re obviously not that concerned about becoming a sex offender or going to jail for like five years,” the friend of one 13-year-old victim told Whaley on Instagram after receiving an explicit photo.

“Mate I’ve been doing this long enough haha. What can the police do? Honestly,” Whaley replied.

“Police don’t have the tools or power to catch people like me.”

The UK-born fiend preyed upon sporty, naive boys on the cusp of puberty and ruthlessly ordered them to share more and more perverted content, “or I start sharing (devil emoji).”

When one distressed child asked him “why are you doing this?” Whaley texted back: “because I can.”

Whaley demanded his victims perform degrading acts beyond their sexual maturity with the threat to share explicit footage with their friends and family if they did not comply.

Whaley now says he feels mortified that he masqueraded as a girl while struggling to come to terms with being bisexual, and admits his damaging manipulation of the boys would have made them feel ashamed.

“I wish I could take back the pain and hurt I have caused,” he wrote in an apology letter to the court.

“A lot of victims begged me not to do what I did … thinking back on it now it makes me feel sick.”

Whaley, who worked as an optical assistant at Specsavers, was arrested at Sydney airport on his way home from a trip to Canada, agreed facts show.

Australian Federal Police discovered child porn on his laptop and iPad, and when officers later raided his family home they found sexually depraved porn depicting a further 250 unidentified kids aged as young as four on Whaley’s external hard drives.

Whaley said he’s “forever grateful” that he still has the support of his sister, mother and cancer-stricken father.

“I am so ashamed that I have let my family down,” he said.

“I was not raised to be like this.”

In January Whaley pleaded guilty to 29 counts of soliciting child porn, five counts of transmitting child porn, 18 counts of using a telecommunications service for sexual activity with children aged under 16, and one count each of possessing and producing child abuse material.

Dozens more charges relating to child porn production, child grooming, threatening serious harm and transmitting child porn were dropped at the time.

Whaley has no prior criminal history and his charges carry a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment with the Crown insisting: “no penalty other than a significant sentence of full-time custody is appropriate.”

He was given a 25 per cent sentence discount for his early guilty pleas.

A doctor’s report found Whaley has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and paraphilia or sexual perversion, but is keen to undergo rehabilitation.

“I am sorry for what I’ve done and I want to prove to court, the victims and their families that this is behind me,” he said.