A Taichung-based saxophone teacher was yesterday sentenced to 18 years in jail, for baiting girls to send him nude photographs and videos of themselves.
The Taichung District Court found Ku Cheng-en (顧承恩), 32, guilty of contravening the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Prevention Act (兒童及少年性剝削防制條例), in 48 cases, involving 32 girls aged below 16.
Prosecutors said that it began investigating the case after a girl in January last year filed a complaint against Ku, who is also a licensed street musician, suspecting that he might own pornographic material of underaged girls.
Searching his premises, police found explicit photos and videos of 48 girls on a memory stick.
In court, prosecutors cited Ku as saying that they had sent him the material voluntarily, as he had dated most of them, while he had paid a few other girls, who he meet in video chat rooms, for sending him the material.
Prosecutors said that Ku in 2012 began joining several local fan clubs and forums of South Korean pop stars, often presenting himself as a teenage girl and using the nickname Lan Ting-ting (藍庭庭) or as a male high-school student.
The court found that Ku met the girls through the clubs and forums, claiming that he was working in the entertainment industry and promising that he could arrange for meetings with pop stars in exchange for explicit material of themselves.
“Ku took advantage of the victims’ celebrity worship to obtain sexually explicit photos and videos of them,” the court filing said.
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