When the detective inspector of the Kripo Erding came to the 14-year-old, it was a hard shock for the girl. It may have been healing, but first of all it was devastating. For a year and a half, the girl chatted with two teenagers who were supposedly the same age. To her, these were real relationships. The sheer number of chat messages alone makes this clear. The girl had exchanged 73,000 messages with “Rico” and 43,000 with his alleged best friend “Maxl”. In fact, she did not write to two 15-year-olds, but to a 59-year-old man with a criminal record who had one thing in mind, as the indictment states: “On various occasions, the accused repeatedly asked the injured party to engage in sexual acts to do to himself and to record this on picture or video or to make naked pictures of himself and send them to him.” In order to get recordings of young males, he pretended to be a girl. He exchanged the pictures and videos with others for other child and youth pornography. The district court in Landshut has now sentenced him to five years in prison.
The man who was in the dock in Room 1 on Monday is a thin person with a wrinkled face and gray hair. He was wearing faded dark blue trousers and a lined brown parka over a white shirt. There was nothing youthful about him. He was formerly married and has two adult children. The last contact with one of them was in writing and was four years ago. His younger daughter wrote him a letter when he was released from prison after serving a sentence for a similar case. It was “just about money,” he explained to the presiding judge in an offended tone.
The Landshut district court is responsible because the accused last lived in Dorfen. In 2019 he met a woman from Dorfen and moved in with her. After the breakup, he stayed with her, “but fell back into his old behavior,” according to his attorney.
The defendant did not comment on the matter in detail. He makes a blanket confession. His defense attorney said he conceded to the prosecution that “everything happened as he was accused of.” The indictment is extensive and detailed. It took the prosecutor 20 minutes to read them out. And yet it is probably only an excerpt of what the accused did.
Apparently, the defendant has the ability to convincingly pose as a juvenile online. He approached his victims on the online service “Knuddels”, which has been criticized several times for its potential for abuse. On the Knuddels homepage under the menu item youth protection it says: “Chat conversations between young people and adults are monitored by technical filters. As soon as possible content that is harmful to young people is discovered, the conversation is immediately ended for both participants and a resumption is prevented.” But the current case shows that this is hardly effective. And after getting to know each other, the accused and his victims only communicated via Whatsapp anyway. There is no age control on Whatsapp.
The accused was found out via detours. In the USA, the security authorities there became aware of a child pornographic photo that the accused had shared with another person. In June, the Erding Criminal Police Office was instructed by the Federal and State Criminal Police Offices and the Central Office for Cybercrime at the Bamberg Public Prosecutor’s Office to search the man’s home. When they first looked at his laptop and cell phone, the detectives came across the chats with the young people’s photos and videos.
He had gained the trust of the girl, who was initially 13 years old, with the fairytale story that he was the scion of an old Portuguese noble family. When they spoke to each other on the phone, he explained that his voice, which was anything but youthful, was the result of a serious illness. Several times he and the girl arranged real meetings, to which he never appeared. When his victim broke up with him, he contacted her under the name “Maxl” as “Rico’s” best friend. He said “Rico” killed himself out of lovesickness and continued to exploit the youngster. In retrospect, the girl is very ashamed of her naivety, said the detective. “But she also told me that she was just happy that she had someone at all.”