A 14-year-old Manitoba girl who kickstarted an international Internet investigation was vindicated when the British man who exploited her pleaded guilty recently to 21 criminal charges.

Adrian Ringland, a 30-something man from the British Midlands town of Ilkeston, appeared in a London courtroom Aug. 25 and pleaded guilty to two counts of indecency with a child, four counts of blackmail, 10 counts of making indecent photos and five counts of unauthorized modification of computers.

It was a teenage girl from an unidentified Manitoba community that led first the RCMP, then British police, to Ringland, who apparently blackmailed the girl by inserting a Trojan Horse virus on her computer, then controlled her computer functions remotely to scare her into providing him with a naked photo of herself.

The Sunday Mirror, a British newspaper, published testimony from a retired RCMP officer who described the man's devious plan, which involved pretending to be a teenage boy who met girls in online chatrooms.

"She was too scared to tell her parents and e-mailed a picture of herself. She was crying and began to panic. She didn't know what to do and sent him a picture of her breast," the former officer said in the Mirror story.

"He came right back, and she saw the mouse on her screen moving around, saw the mouse going up and clicking on her e-mail address book, and he highlighted every person in there and said, 'I'm now going to send them all a picture of your breast, if you don't send me a complete picture of your body.'"

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