Sextortionist sentenced to 33 years for targeting 145 children

A Canadian man was sentenced to 33 years in prison after pleading guilty to targeting more than 145 children across the United States, some as young as 6 years old, in an eight-year-long sextortion scheme.

40-year-old Ramanan Pathmanathan pleaded guilty on January 30, 2026, to one count of coercion and enticement of a minor and one count of child pornography production.

Besides his 33-year sentence, Pathmanathan also has to register as a sex offender and serve 10 years of supervised release. He is already serving a 12-year prison term in Canada following a 2022 guilty plea to similar offenses there.

Sextortion is a form of online blackmail in which cybercriminals threaten targets with publicly leaking explicit images and videos they acquired (through coercion) or stole (through hacking), while also (in some cases) demanding to be paid for not releasing the compromising content.

While in many cases of sextortion, the material used by the malicious actors for blackmail is not real, as they are only using it to pressure the victims into paying an extortion demand, according to court documents, Pathmanathan used multiple Instagram and Facebook Messenger accounts to record victims engaging in sexual acts.

Pathmanathan contacted at least 145 young victims between March 2014 and his arrest on March 10, 2021, while posing as a teenage boy from New Jersey.

Throughout this sextortion scheme, he demanded victims engage in sexually explicit conduct via video chat and threatened to send recordings to their friends and family if they refused or blocked his accounts.

"Pathmanathan demanded the minor victims engage in sexually explicit conduct while they participated in video chats with him. He directed them to expose their genitals, and to engage in sexual acts with dogs, siblings, and other relatives. In almost all the video chats with his minor victims, Pathmanathan sent the children images of adults engaged in sexual acts to show them how to do what he was requesting," the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

"Pathmanathan recorded his victims' sexually explicit conduct and saved the files on his desktop computer. Some of the victims were as young as six years old. When the minor victims would decline to continue to engage in sexually explicit conduct or blocked Pathmanathan's social media accounts, he threatened to send images to the children's friends or family."

In September 2021, the FBI also warned of a massive increase in sextortion complaints and advised those receiving sextortion threats to stop all interaction with the criminals immediately, contact law enforcement, and file a complaint as soon as possible.

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