An undercover police officer posing as a 14 year old girl trapped 35 year old Philip Stanney in online chat room when he went by the username ‘philmanchester’ and sent the child profile a private message immediately asking how old she was.
The officer responded to Stanney stating that she was 14 years old and a year 9 pupil.
Stanney never questioned the girl being underage and continued the conversation over several days with his messages becoming increasingly sexualised, asking the girl inappropriate questions about her appearance and how sexually experienced she was, commenting “you into older guys?”.
Stanney then escalated the conversation by asking the girl to send nude photographs as well as requesting a photo of her with his name written on her arm, so he could ‘own her’ commenting “I like the idea of you being mine”.
Four months later in October 2019, after gathering enough evidence to identify him, officers attended Stanney’s address where he was arrested and later charged.
In police interview, Stanney admitted that there were potentially a large number of underage victims that he had talked to on the chat rooms and received photos from. Following his arrest, a mobile phone and laptop were seized and forensically examined with a number of images found of underage girls, three of those being category A images, the most serious level of abuse.
Stanney was jailed for 27 months after pleading guilty to onecount of attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child, four counts of attempting to cause/incite a child to engage in sexual activity and three counts of making an indecent photograph of a child.
Detective Inspector Suzanne Keenaghan, of GMPs Sexual Crime Unit, said: “Stanney is an extremely manipulative man who preyed upon underage girls for his own sexual gratification. The online relationships that he formed with some of these girls will no doubt have a lasting effect on them and I am pleased to see that he is now behind bars where he can no longer be a danger to children.
“This conviction has come as a result of a proactive investigation into child sexual exploitation, which deploys specially trained undercover officers to online platforms to identify offenders.
“I hope this gives some reassurance to the public that GMP are continuously working hard behind the scenes to put a stop to this despicable type of crime and bring offenders to justice.”
