A 61-year-old computer consultant from Randers has been sentenced to 30 years in a US prison for tricking an 11-year-old girl to perform sex acts in front of a web cam and later threatening to expose her publicly.
Posing as 14-year-old boy, Kai Lundstrøm Pedersen recorded the 25-minute session and later used the video to terrorise the girl by sending pictures to her friends and family.
When the girl later tried to break contact, Pedersen began to threaten her, according to the St Joseph (Missouri) News-Press.
“I have 56 pictures and a video of you,” he wrote on 1 August 2010. “The pictures are from the video and this one is just a free sample,” he is reported to have written in an e-mail. “If you donÂ’t want me to post everything on the internet, then write back to me. Maybe we can find a way to prevent me from making everything public. I could also send them to your Facebook friends??”
On 10 August 2010, the victimÂ’s mother asked the police to investigate after receiving one of the pictures.
Pedersen was arrested in September 2010 while visiting the US on a trip reportedly not related to the child pornography case. Investigators, who had been posing as the 11-year-old on Facebook, determined he would be in the US and used his IP address to determine his location.
Pedersen, who plead guilty to extortion and production and transportation of child pornography. During the trial he apologised to the girl, calling his conduct “awful” and “inexcusable”.
“I’m not in a position to ask her or her family to forgive me,” Pedersen told the court. “I just hope the memory will fade.”
Pedersen was facing between 15 and 30 years for his crimes, and while his lawyer admitted that her client’s offences were “horrific”, she noted that in Denmark such a conviction would have carried only a six year sentence.
The judge, however, criticised Denmark for not taking these types of crime more seriously, and said that by handing down the maximum sentence he was sending a message to child pornographers.
Noting that most child pornography cases involve viewers not producers, Kays said: “You’re unique, Mr. Pedersen, because we don’t often get people like you.”
