A Derby sex offender who posed as teenagers online to blackmail 152 children — some as young as nine — into sending him sexual material has been jailed for 31 years and branded “every parent’s worst nightmare” by the judge who sentenced him.
Siah Riley, 36, of Walbrook Road, Normanton, carried out his campaign of abuse over a period of two years and eight months between 2021 and 2023, using fake Snapchat profiles to target girls aged between nine and 16. He created two accounts — one under the name Josh King, posing as a teenage boy, and another under the name Kim, posing as a teenage girl — to lure his victims into sending him sexual images and videos.
When victims refused to comply or became reluctant, Riley turned to blackmail. He threatened 24 of his victims that he would post their images to TikTok, Facebook, pornography websites and the dark web unless they continued sending material. When one victim told him she was only ten years old, he replied: “I don’t care, you are hot.” He told another victim he “hoped her parents would see” the images he was threatening to publish.
Officers who arrested Riley discovered he had been using one device to communicate with victims and a separate device to covertly record what they sent him, before transferring the material to a laptop where he stored it in files sorted by the names of each victim. When police seized his devices, they found 1,831 images of his victims retained for his own sexual gratification, along with a wider collection of indecent images of children. One 13-year-old victim, who had been manipulated into referring to Riley as “Master” and apologising for “not doing better” for him, was subsequently threatened with having her videos posted across multiple platforms.
Sentencing Riley at Derby Crown Court, Judge Shaun Smith KC said he had never in 46 years of legal practice encountered a case involving so many offences and so many victims. “This was depraved,” he told Riley. “The extent of your obsession with online pornography involving young girls is truly breathtaking. You have no moral compass. You are every parent’s worst nightmare. In one video you told a girl to choke herself so she knew you were in charge.”
Victim impact statements read to the court laid bare the lasting damage inflicted. One mother said: “My family will never forgive and forget what you have done because every time I see the scars on my daughter’s arms it makes me hate you a little more.” Victims described their personalities as having been “destroyed” and spoke of feeling they had “betrayed themselves.”
Riley, who has a previous conviction for rape dating from 2012 for which he received a six-and-a-half-year sentence, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of causing or inciting children to engage in sexual activity, sexual communication with a child, causing or inciting a child to engage in prostitution or pornography, and 23 counts of blackmail. His 31-year sentence comprises 25 years in custody plus a six-year extended licence. The judge also imposed a lifetime sexual harm prevention order and a permanent place on the sex offender register.
In mitigation, defence counsel Steve Gosnell said Riley had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and that “he does regret this and he does apologise.”
