Teenager jailed for 15 years after using Facebook to blackmail seven students into sex



Jailed: Anthony Stancl

An American teenager has been sentenced to 15 years in jail after posing as a girl on Facebook to blackmail seven classmates into sex.

Anthony Stancl, 19, of Wisconsin, was accused of tricking more than 30 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves.

He then used the photos as blackmail, threatening to post them online unless the students had sex with him.

He forced at least seven of them into some sort of sexual activity with him in encounters that he documented with a mobile phone.

Up to 300 photographs of underage males, some as young as 15, were found on Stancl's computer, police said.

He had pleaded to two charges, including the repeated sexual assault of a child.



The investigation began after a 16-year-old boy told authorities he was being blackmailed into sex acts with Stancl.



The boy, then 15, had exchanged explicit pictures of himself online with 'Kayla,' who later threatened to spread his picture throughout the school unless he agreed to the acts with Stancl.



Stancl photographed those encounters, giving him fodder for further blackmail, detectives said.



The boy agreed to at least four sex acts, but when 'Kayla' asked him for a nude photo of his brother he went to his parents and the police.



Police identified 31 victims, each of whom exchanged nude photographs or videos with someone they thought was a female.



More than half said the person with whom they communicated threatened to release the images unless they agreed to let the person's male friend perform sex acts on them.



The investigation overlapped with a separate case in which Stancl was accused of writing a bomb threat on a bathroom wall at the school in November 2008.

He followed it up with an anonymous e-mail to two teachers that said, 'Good luck tomorrow. Boom.'



Stancl admitted to detectives he sent the e-mail from the public library under a false identity.



A charge of causing a bomb scare was among those dismissed as part of Stancl's plea agreement.

Stancl showed no emotion yesterday as the sentence was handed down. He had faced up to 30 years in jail.

Earlier, he told the court that he now empathises with what his victims went through.









