IT worker who led ‘double life’ posing as teenage girls online jailed for soliciting child porn

In short:

An IT worker has been sentenced to more than eight years behind bars for extorting child pornography from multiple teenage victims.

Abhijeet Kulkarni posed as young girls on social media, where he befriended the teenagers, before demanding increasingly sexualised photos and videos.

What’s next? 

Kulkarni will be eligible for parole in 2028.

An IT professional who lived a double life posing as teenage girls online to solicit child pornography from young boys has been jailed.

Abhijeet Kulkarni was sentenced in the District Court in Sydney after he pleaded guilty to eight charges related to soliciting and disseminating hundreds of child pornography photos and videos.

The offences involved six victims, including five teenage boys aged under 16.

The court heard the Illawarra IT worker would befriend his teenage victims on social media pretending to be a young girl, before moving to encrypted platforms where he would solicit increasingly sexualised photos and videos.

Judge John Pickering sentenced the 46-year-old to eight years and three months in jail, with a non-parole period of five years and three months.

“Sadly, there are predators online who take advantage of what should be a fairly normal way in which young people grow into their sexuality,” Judge Pickering said.

Judge Pickering said Kulkarni’s crimes will have a devastating impact on his family in Australia, as well as his family back in India who relied on his “very good” IT salary.

He pointed to statements provided by Kulkarni’s wife and son, which referred to him as a good father and husband.

“How he is effectively able to live a double life with them, of being a good father and a good husband, while behaving in such a, quite frankly, despicable way to his victims, is not that unusual,” Judge Pickering said.

“People are quite able to effectively live two different lives and be a good person in one area and a criminal in another.”

Offending reported by Gumtree user

The court heard the offender was first reported to police by his adult victim after he responded to their Gumtree advertisement for the sale of a school boy uniform.

Kulkarni struck up a conversation with the ad owner, claiming he had found improper photos on his children’s phones, before sending through multiple naked photos of children.

The victim took screenshots of the photos and sent them to police.

One of the images included photos a 13-year-old boy who was another victim.

That boy began talking to Kulkarni in 2018, who at the time told the victim he was a 12-year-old girl from his area called Chloe.

At first Kulkarni requested images of the boy in his school uniform, but the requests became gradually more sexualised.

The offender sent 5,000 messages to the teenage boy over the course of the offending, as well as more than 300 child pornography files.

As a direct response to requests from Kulkarni, the teenager sent at least 20 sexual videos in return.

By 2019 the police had taken over the teenager’s social media account, however Kulkarni discovered the deception when he figured out they were using an IP tracker on his account.

Judge Pickering said Kulkarni used his IT knowledge to “avoid being discovered by law enforcement officers”.

“Consistent with his intelligence in IT matters, he was onto the police,” the judge said.

‘Deep emotional wounds’ for victims

Another victim, a 15-year-old boy from Adelaide, encountered Kulkarni when he was posing as a 15-year-old girl called Kate on the teenage dating site “My lol”.

The boy later confronted Kulkarni after he requested a high-definition video of him performing a sex act.

During one exchange, Kulkarni told the boy he was a “child porn collector and trader” and asked whether he knew about “capping”, the act of tricking someone into doing something improper and then recording it.

The boy responded to the message by saying: “I can get you arrested you know?”

Kulkarni told the boy he would share the explicit photos of him with his school if that happened.

The offender continued to demand videos from the boy, even after he confessed he was highly distressed, anxious and vomiting.

“What you get there is a true insight into the depravity of the offender at this time,” Judge Pickering said.

“His own sexual gratification was more important than the highly distressed situation of [the victim’s] position.”

The teenage boy was the only victim to provide a victim impact statement.

“I was robbed of my innocence and left in a constant state of terror,” he said.

“Even today I find it incredibly difficult to forge romantic relationships because of the deep emotional wounds inflicted upon me.”

Judge Pickering told the court that the offender told a psychiatrist he himself was a victim of child sexual abuse.

“It is difficult to think it did not play any role in why he behaved in the fashion he now has,” he said.

Kulkarni will be eligible for parole in July 2028.