Trainee paramedic who blackmailed four teenage boys to send explicit photos and videos sentenced

A trainee paramedic who blackmailed four teenage boys, including two brothers, to send explicit pictures and videos of themselves has been handed a two year probation order. Newry Crown Court heard that 22-year-old Mark Wilson set up numerous fake Snapchat accounts to pose as a female in order to dupe the boys and then using the images to blackmail them into sending more on threat of public exposure. Wilson, from Thornleigh in Armagh, confessed his guilt to seven of the 12 charges against him – inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, inciting a child to take an indecent image of themselves, distributing indecent images of children and attempting to possess an indecent image of a child, all committed between December 1, 2016 and June 1, 2017. While the other five charges, four blackmail and one of sexual communication with a child, were being left in the books, prosecuting counsel Fiona O’Kane said the guilty pleas were being accepted “on a full facts basis”. In an agreed statement of facts lodged with the court, Mrs O’Kane outlined how the offences first came to light on June 1 when the vice principal of an Armagh grammar school contacted police “that…
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