The high-flying banker, had flown more than 100 miles from London to Birmingham and checked into a hotel room to meet a 14-year-old girl.
Balachandran Kavungalparambath, 38, a business manager at Citibank in East London was waiting to meet an underage girl who he had been ‘grooming’ over online chats, but was instead confronted by a team of vigilantes.
Two months after this confrontation with a paedophile hunter group called Internet Interceptors was played live on Facebook, the banker has been sentenced to 15 months in jail by the Birmingham Crown Court on October 23.
Internet Interceptors are a team that hunts paedophiles and sexual predators across the United Kingdom.
In September they exposed Balachandran through a Facebook Live video. The banker had been speaking to one of their team members who had posed as a 14-year-old girl.
Balachandran groomed the ‘girl’ through Whatsapp chats and convinced her to have sex with him at a hotel room in Birmingham. While grooming her online, Balachandran had even told the girl that her first time (having sex) would be painful.
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Balachandran who is married and father of a kid initially denied that he was there to have sex with the girl. He told the vigilantes that he just wanted to have lunch with her. He also claimed in the beginning that he thought that the girl had been 18. He even blamed the girl claiming that she had asked him to come to the room.
"But as I said, I was supposed to have a chat with her, it was not with the intention of getting her into a bed and having sex with her,” he said.
But his lie was busted as his perverted messages were read out.
A member of the group read out messages in which he makes direct references to having sex and even tells the girl that he would be gentle with her.
The sexually explicit chats in which the man describes his desire to perform various sexual acts on the young girl was enough to convince the court about his crime.
“I have to leave the country and I will lose my job. I am from India,” he can be heard crying and pleading to the people who caught him.
Finally, he admits that he wanted to have sex with her.
While arranging the meeting, he had said "I want to see those beautiful eyes" before adding "making you pregnant is not my intention" and the meeting "would end with us making love", The Mirror reports.
When he was asked to clear his backpack, a packet of condoms and a perfume tumbled on to the table. He also said the perfume was a gift for ‘her’.
"We don't have much more information about him. We called his wife and informed her about this, but she hung up on us. He has been grooming her online for about two months," Internet Interceptors group told The News Minute.
The interceptors team had posted a one hour long video at the end of which police arrest him. Balachandran will be placed on UK sex offender register for 10 years and given a 10 year sexual harm prevention order. However, he will be deported to India after this 15 month sentence. Citibank has said he is no longer an employee.
Online sexual grooming in India
In May this year, TNM had reported about one such case from Tamil Nadu. A 13-year-old had been groomed over Facebook chats and lured by a man. She was raped by two men, but could eventually return home.
"Abusers study a situation carefully to understand what a child's Achilles heel is and then exploit the situation. Now, with almost every child having accesses to technology and internet in the form of a laptop or phone, these criminals have found new platforms to target children," Vidya Reddy, of Tulir, Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse had then told TNM.
According to UNICEF, it can be defined as preparing a child or adult for sexual abuse, exploitation or ideological manipulation. A report released by the organisation in 2014 states that the surge in mobile and internet usage in India had brought 400 million people online. Of this, seven percent of internet users in the country are reportedly children.
Even a report of the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology in 2014 recognized the threat posed to children by predatory paedophiles online. It emphasises how these predators "conceal their true identity whilst using the internet to ‘groom’ potential victims for sexual purposes."