Muhammad Khairy Ariffin, a 30-year-old man in Singapore, has been sentenced to six months and six weeks in jail for possessing child pornography and other offenses.
According to The Straits Times, Khairy had owned a Twitter account containing sexually explicit material and had made 816 obscene videos for sale.
According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Yvonne Poon, Khairy began using the dating app Grindr in 2018 and got consent from other app users to film their sexual activities and post the videos on his Twitter account.
The filming was usually done in the staircase areas of Housing Board blocks near his home, according to the report.
Khairy branded his videos with the identifier that they had been taken at HDB staircases and used that as a primary marketing point. His social media following grew to around 30,000 followers, and he also started a Telegram group chat so that his followers could communicate with him directly.
STAIRCASE
Initially, Khairy posted his obscene videos for free, but his followers later asked him to put the clips up for sale.
They also said they were willing to pay for hotel rooms for sexual activities. He began posting such videos for sale from around August 2019, grouping them in different categories with differing prices according to their content. After receiving payment, Khairy would send the videos to the buyers through Telegram.
According to DPP Poon, Khairy’s offenses came to light after a 37-year-old manager chanced upon his Twitter account and saw that one of the tweets contained a link to a Telegram group chat.
The older man joined the group and realized that the owner of the chat was selling pornographic videos.
The manager then came across messages from some members stating that they were engaging in sexual activities with minors below 16 years old. He left the chat group and alerted the police on Jan 7, 2020, The Straits Times reported.
Police raided Khairy’s home about three months later and seized his belongings, including an iPhone that they later found contained 203 sexually explicit videos of children.
The accused knew that these videos had been downloaded, but did not delete them as he would continue receiving new videos from the Telegram chat groups anyway.
Officers also found the 816 obscene videos which Khairy had made.
At the time of his arrest, he had about 34,000 followers on Twitter and some 1,600 members in his Telegram group chat.
DPP Poon stated that Khairy did not intentionally seek out the child abuse videos but they had been automatically downloaded from chat groups on messaging platform Telegram.
“He did not leave the groups as he saw them as an avenue to get more followers on his Twitter account, giving him a larger customer base to sell the obscene videos he filmed and produced,” she added.
Khairy’s bail was set at $15,000 on Friday, and he is expected to surrender himself at the State Courts on May 2 to begin serving his sentence.
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