You have to be careful with whom you do business out there. And for aspiring models this is doubly true as the recent sentencing of Paul Brown illustrates.
Brown established a fraudulent modeling agency in Devon, UK, and scammed women as young as their teens to sixty plus.
He convinced them to take explicit photos for him and even have sex with him in front of the camera in the promise of lucrative modeling gigs. Of course, this was all a lie.
The BBC reports that Brown preyed on vulnerable women and often contacted them himself to lure them into his scheme.
While he largely hid his identity-behind his sham company, Models South West, it was not hard for investigators to connect the dots back to him when one woman came forward about her experience in 2017.
For his part, Brown has provided investigators with a wealth of evidence including a diary that detailed his crimes as well as photographic and video evidence.
The investigation took police two years and involved 16 victims in total.
Michael French from the CPS told the BBC:
“His victims were made to submit to his will under the pressure of the situation he created through his lies.
These women were deceived into believing they were attending photo shoots for the purposes of being accepted by a modelling agency. They say they would not have acted as they did if they had known the truth, which is that the agency didn't exist and Brown was acting purely for his own personal pleasure.”
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