Teenager accused of sex assaults in Facebook scam

AN 18-year-old male student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts.

“The kind of manipulation that occurred here is really sinister in my estimation,” Waukesha County district attorney Brad Schimel said.

The students go to New Berlin Eisenhower High School in New Berlin, which is in Waukesha County about 24km west of Milwaukee.

Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin, was charged with five counts of child enticement, two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child, and making a bomb threat.

Stancl’s attorney, Craig Kuhary, said Stancl plans to plead not guilty to the charges and hopes to reach a plea agreement with the district attorney

“It’s too early in the case for me to make a statement, other than the fact at some point we are going to go into events that had taken place earlier that might have had some impact on what he did here,” he said. He wouldn’t go into specifics.

According to the criminal complaint, Stancl first contacted the students through the social networking site Facebook, pretending to be a girl named Kayla or Emily.

Officers found about 300 nude images of juvenile males on his computer, according to the complaint.

A preliminary hearing for Stancl has been scheduled for February 26.

The maximum penalty if convicted on all charges is nearly 300 years in prison.