London: A 38-year-old cab driver, who pretended to be a doctor to impress Muslim women including from Pakistan and secretly filmed himself having sex with them to extort money besides threatening to shame them, has been jailed for eight and a half years in the UK.

He was convicted on charges of sexual assault, blackmail, voyeurism, theft and fraud against three victims at Cardiff Crown Court, where Judge Tom Crowther described his actions as “pure misogyny”.

Farhan Mirza, from Abertillery, South Wales, met the women, who were looking for long-term relationships, using a false profile on a dating website. To impress and manipulate them into sex, he would hang surgical scrubs in his wardrobe and also carry a stethoscope, The Independent reported on Sunday.

In reality, he worked as a taxi driver and IT worker and lived with his mother, the report said.

He also falsely told one woman he was an IT manager and his family were all in successful jobs, such as that his father was a company director in Pakistan and his sister was a doctor.

Mirza used the videos to blackmail his victims, who were all Muslim women, the report said, adding that they were targeted because of the acute shame they would suffer if the films were made public.

He also threatened to send the videos to one of his victim’s relatives in Pakistan, where she feared they could be targeted by extremist religious groups, it said.

A victim went to the police after she discovered 70,000 pounds in cash at his house and intimate images of herself and other women.

“It is the prosecution’s case that Mr Mirza is a particular kind of sexual predator and he chooses his victims carefully,” the Guardian quoted prosecutor Timothy Evans as telling the court.

“Because of their religious and ethnic backgrounds, he targeted them because of the terror, embarrassment and humiliation that each of these ladies would have felt in their minds by what this defendant did to them,” Evans said.