Predator lured teenagers into sharing explicit images

A young Dublin man who engaged in “catfishing” to lure teenage boys into sharing explicit images of themselves online will be sentenced early next year.

Garda Daniel Tracey revealed that Ben Mooney (22) used the name “Nicole Heffernon” to email and contact teenage boys through Facebook.

Gda Tracey explained that Mooney had been “catfishing”, which is pretending to be someone else online, to obtain images of boys in their underwear and naked. The garda said there were also videos of the teenagers masturbating.

Mooney later told gardaí­he had contacted up to 15 teenage boys in the two years before he was caught.

Mooney, of Rathsallagh Park, Shankill, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to knowingly possessing child porn and possessing 4,000 images and 300 videos of child porn on a Samsung mobile phone at his home on January 5th, 2016. He has no previous convictions.

Garda Tracey told Genevieve Coonan, prosecuting, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in America contacted gardaí­ about two email addresses sharing child porn.

Parents present

One of these email addresses was in the name Nicole Heffernon and the other belonged to a 16-year-old boy.

During the investigation gardaí­ spoke to this boy, along with two other males aged 16 and 15 years. They told officers that a person pretending to be a 16-year-old girl had contacted them through Facebook and had been sending them explicit material.

Garda Tracey said the IP address for the Nicole Heffernon email led back to Mooney’s home. He and colleagues obtained a search warrant for the premises, where Mooney and his parents were present.

Mooney asked his parents to leave him with gardaí­ and then admitted he had contacted up to 15 teenage boys over the last two years.

Garda Tracey said Mooney gave officers several emails, with which he had communicated with other suspected paedophiles through a Russian website. Officers also seized two mobile phones and a computer hard drive during the search.

Garda Tracey told Ms Coonan that 70 per cent of the 6,000 images on the phones was a mixture of pornography and child pornography. He said the child-porn images fell on to the lower two levels of the scale and consisted of children posing erotically, solo masturbation and sexual activity between minors.

Turned life around

He said a “huge percentage” of the material involved young males between 10 to 16 years old.

Garda Tracey agreed with Seán Guerin SC, defending, that Mooney made full admissions before forensic analysis had been done on the computer hard drive. He accepted that Mooney had been a 19-year-old at the time and that he had been struggling with his sexuality.

He further agreed that Mooney seems to have turned his life around, noting that at the time he was “staying up all night playing computer games and sleeping all day”.

Judge Melanie Greally ordered a report from the Probation Service and adjourned the sentence to January, when she will hear a plea in mitigation from Mr Guerin.