UPDATE: Singh has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Original story below…
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BALTIMORE, MD—A Texas man faces up to ten years in prison after cyberstalking and “swatting” a Baltimore County woman.
Desmond Babloo Singh, 20, of Temple, Texas, pleaded guilty on Monday to two counts of cyberstalking.
The guilty plea was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Erek L. Barron; Special Agent in Charge James R. Mancuso of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Baltimore; and Chief Melissa R. Hyatt of the Baltimore County Police Department.
According to his guilty plea, from April 18, 2020, to November 24, 2020, Singh used more than 100 different social media accounts, phone accounts, and various electronic communication tools to send harassing messages to a Baltimore County resident. The hundreds of public social media posts, text messages, and private social media messages included threats of death, bodily injury, sexualized violence, and racial slurs. Many of the accounts created and used by Singh incorporated the woman’s name, making it appear as if the accounts were owned and operated by her.
Singh was arrested in December 2020, while living in New York.
Earlier in 2020, Singh sent the victim online communications expressing his romantic interest in her. After she rebuffed Singh’s advances and asked him not to contact her, Singh commenced a months’-long cyberstalking campaign against both the woman and another male victim, whom Singh viewed as a romantic rival.
Singh frequently used the fraudulent accounts he created to denigrate the woman’s character, appearance, and make the assertion that she was “obsessed” with him. Singh’s harassing conduct included, among other things, numerous implied threats of bodily injury or death. Singh used a fraudulent social media account to send the woman an image in which the faces of her and her family members were superimposed on the faces of several individuals hanging from nooses. In another edited picture, Singh superimposed the victim’s mother’s face on the body of a grieving woman at a grave site.
On or about July 19, 2020, the female victim received a “follow” request on a social media platform from an account that Singh created. On this account, Singh had posted pictures of the woman and her family home. Additionally, Singh posted her parents’ address in Maryland and stated there would be a party there the following day. The following day, July 20, 2020, a Baltimore County Police Department employee received an anonymous email telling law enforcement to investigate a possible bomb at the parents’ home. Law enforcement officers responded to the residence only to learn that the bomb threat was a hoax. The federal investigation into Singh’s conduct revealed that Singh had solicited another individual to “swat” the parents’ home.
Singh also posted the woman’s personal information online, including her date of birth, name, personal phone number, school, social media identities, and other identifying information online. This is commonly referred to as “doxing”.
During the investigation of Singh’s harassment campaign, investigators discovered notes in Singh’s phone that documented his plans to harass the victim, including the plans to physically assault the victim’s family members, post over 10,000 messages relating to her friends, harass the male victim, and take pictures of the woman in real life.
Singh created numerous social media accounts incorporating the male victim’s real name and publicly posted his personal information. Using an anonymous account, Singh posted a video of an unidentifiable person knocking on the male victim’s former residence with a caption telling the male victim to answer the door. Later, Singh later posted the same video on an online platform which included the male victim’s name, his former address, and a statement indicating that he went to his residence to fight him.
Singh faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison for each count of cyberstalking followed by three years of supervised release. U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett has scheduled sentencing for April 5, 2022 at 2:30 p.m.
Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels
