Canadian man Ramanan Pathmanathan was sentenced to 33 years in federal prison for a sextortion scheme that targeted at least 145 children across the United States, some as young as six years old. Pathmanathan posed as a teenage boy using Instagram and Facebook Messenger from March 2014 until his arrest in March 2021, demanding victims engage in sexually explicit conduct via video chat and threatening to share images with family. He also received a 12-year sentence in Canada for similar offenses, to run consecutively.
