Barry McElduff and Phillip Allman prosecute ‘catfishing and sextortion’ case
Barry McElduff led Philip Allman in a trial in which the Defendant Waleed Saeed had ‘catfished’ 5 young Asian males. The ‘catfishing’ occurred on Snapchat; with the Defendant who was in his late 20s posing as either a teenager girl, teenage boy or a person with transgender identity. The Defendant would trick his victims into exchanging sexual images with him. Once obtained he would blackmail them for money or more sexual images and threaten to release their images online.
Such was the hold he had over his victims, one of them was forced to meet him in a park where he was raped on multiple occasions. Having pleaded guilty on the first day of trial to offences relating to 4 of his 5 victims, he was subsequently convicted by the jury in relation to the victim he had raped.
