Cara* was 15 when Jordan Croft entered her life.
In year 9 at school, she was a keen dancer and had just started to use social media.
A naturally shy teenager, she was flattered when a young teenage boy approached her online and started up a conversation.
She had no idea that he was a predatory paedophile who would go on to make her life “hell”.
“He was really nice at first and he built my trust up,” she said. “I enjoyed talking to him as I had never had this sort of interaction with anyone before.”
Croft said he wanted to get to know her and make her feel happy. He called her cute - the first person who had ever complimented her in this way.
One night, Cara tried to send a picture of herself to her two best friends who lived far away. It was meant to stay between Cara and her friends, but she accidentally sent it to Croft.
“From this point he made my life hell,” she said.
Croft screenshotted the photo, called her a s**g, and sent the photo to some of her friends. From there Croft had Cara under his grip. Croft, who was not in fact a teenage boy but a man in his 20s, would use this tactic on dozens of young girls.
Posing as a boy their age, he would start conversations online before persuading them to send him one photo of themselves. Once he had that first photo, he would begin a campaign of blackmail and manipulation.
The young girls were so terrified of him that they would perform horrific acts in the desperate hope that, if they did one more job, Croft would let them stop.
A prolific paedophile, Croft pleaded guilty to 65 offences against 26 women in August 2022, and had victims aged between 7 and 22-years-old.
He spammed a huge number of female users online, messaging more than 5,000 people on just one application. The scale of his offending was immense.
The National Crime Agency discovered 906 encrypted images of children on just one of Croft’s phones.
Victims were forced to film themselves entering into a contract of “sexual slavery” where their every move was monitored by Croft.
They had to ask permission to use the toilet - and were even told to put a note in their underwear as a reminder. Croft would create lists of victims’ family and friends, and threaten to send the girls’ pictures to everyone they knew.
Victims had to send him copies of their school timetable and were forced to move communication with him onto the secure messaging platform Telegram.
In one list of conditions, sent by Croft to a victim, he wrote: “You must tell me when you’re going to be busy, so I won’t think your [sic] ignoring me.
“You will complete any punishments I give you, but if you behave you won’t need to be punished.” In two cases, Croft blackmailed teenage girls into taking indecent images of 7-year-olds to send to him.
Samantha* was 14 when she met Croft on the social media app Yubo. Her mother was in hospital for cancer treatment and she was “alone and vulnerable”.
“One night whilst at home, the man I now know to be Jordan contacted me on Yubo. At that time everyone my age had it because it was a platform for making friends,” she said.
Croft threatened to send their chats to all her family and friends unless she sent an intimate picture to him.
“I clinged on to the hope that if I just did what he wanted he would just leave me alone,” she said. “He got me to pose naked while he directed and recorded a particular way.”
The campaign of abuse did not stop and “he was by now controlling my everyday life,” Samantha said.
“He would contact me numerous times day and night, demanding explicit images were sent to him. This included a disgusting obsession with me urinating for him,” she added.
Croft, who is now 26, would tell his victims that the only way to escape the abuse was to have sex with him or to find another child as a replacement.
He worked in IT for a company in Brighton and was confident that the police would not be able to track him online, telling victims that he had a degree in cybersecurity.
His first known victim was abused in April 2018 and, after a number of similar reports made to police forces in Yorkshire, the case was referred to the National Crime Agency.
Officers managed to unpick Croft’s elusive online footprint and arrested him in September 2019. It took until March 2021 to defeat the encryption on one of his mobile phones.
One victim impact statement, read out at Croft’s sentencing on Friday, said: “I will never be scared of you. My mum wants you to know that you have destroyed our lives, that you are selfish and perverse. She wants you to know that she is the proud mother of a brave daughter who stood up to you and won.
“You told us the police would never find you, but here we are today to prove that you were never as untouchable as you thought.”
Jordan Croft was sentenced to 26 years in jail on Friday.
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
