Facebook con-man 'tricked students into posing nude'

An American student was accused today of posing as a girl on a internet social site to trick male classmates into sending him nude photos which he then used to blackmail them.

Anthony Stancl ,18, fooled at least 31 of them using the Facebook network.

“The kind of manipulation that occurred here is really sinister in my estimation,” District Attorney Brad Schimel said.

Stancl, of New Berlin, near Milwaukee, was charged today 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 lawyer Craig Kuhary said he would plead not guilty to the charges and hoped to reach a plea agreement.

“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.

The incidents happened from spring 2007 up to November, when officers questioned Stancl about a bomb threat he allegedly sent to teachers and wrote about on a school’s bathroom wall.

Stancl first contacted the students through Facebook pretending to be a girl named Kayla or Emily.

The boys reported that they were tricked into sending nude photos or videos of themselves.

Thirty-one victims were identified and interviewed and more than half said the girl with whom they thought they were communicating tried to get them to meet with a male friend to let him perform sex acts on them.

They were told that if they did not, she would send the nude photos or movies to their friends and post them on the internet.

Seven boys were identified in the complaint by their initials as either performing sex acts on Stancl or Stancl on them. Stancl took photos with his mobile phone of the encounters.

Officers found about 300 nude images of boys on his computer, some as young as 15.