Victims blackmailed into filming depraved sex acts for sick paedophile who ‘targeted 600 women’ reveal their terror that he would ‘kill them’

Victims of a prolific dating app predator believed to have targeted 600 women have opened up about their horrific ordeals after the sick paedophile blackmailed them into performing depraved acts on camera.

The sick crimes of Antony ‘Danny’ Burns, who prowled dating apps and sugar daddy sites for prey, have been revealed in a Channel 5 documentary where two of his victims detail how they were left so terrorised by his extortion, they were too scared to leave the house and feared he would kill them.

In 2024, eight of Burns’s victims faced him in Birmingham Crown Court, where he was convicted of controlling and coercing 27 women between 2018 and 2020. The National Crime Agency believes he attempted to blackmail 600 women during his campaign of online abuse.

The depraved demands included forcing a mother to ‘sexually abuse’ her eight-year-old daughter on camera to fulfil his sick fantasies.

Originally from Lowestoft in Suffolk, the 39-year-old is thought to have attempted to blackmail 600 victims in total, but ‘showed no remorse’ throughout his trial and eventual conviction when he was jailed for 24 years 

The twisted predator had victims spanning multiple continents, with women in the UK, US and Australia falling prey to his manipulative and calculated tactics for blackmail.

When his phone was confiscated in 2020, police discovered his phone filled with women’s phone numbers, including 297 in the UK, each which were saved under derogatory phrases. 

Burns would target women on dating sites and sugar daddy apps, posing as a normal and ‘genuine guy’ with fake pictures, before encouraging them into sending explicit pictures of themselves. 

He would then dredge up personal details about the women, including who their families were and where they lived, threatening to destroy their lives if they didn’t continue to provide him with sexual material. 

It became clear that there was no limit to what Burns would ask of his victims, with many asked to perform twisted acts.

One officer on the case recalled being ‘shocked’ by the case. ‘Victims were asked to defecate, or wee in a cup or wet themselves and put their underwear that their were wearing in their mouths and suck it,’ he said.

When he was arrested, police also found footage of the predator having requested a mother to ‘abuse her daughter’. 

Speaking on the Channel 5 documentary, Hayley, who was identified as ‘victim number 15’ in the documentary, said she first encountered Burns following ‘a very bad breakup’. 

At the time, she was working as a carer and was ‘absolutely desperate for money’, and so went on a sugar daddy dating site on the advice of a friend, in the hopes of scoring some easy cash.

She described the sites as places where ‘rich men go to spoil younger women’.

The two then began chatting, with Burns claiming to be a ‘business owner’ from Malibu in the US, who was ‘worth millions’. 

After requesting six videos for $600, Hayley obliged to Burns’s requests, initially believing Burns lived in a different country and that ‘nothing bad would happen’.

Hayley said the conversation quickly took a sexual and ‘domineering’ turn. 

‘He said, “this is what I want and I want it now” – I was just a sex slave to him.’

Hayley said Burns became ‘manipulative’ and had instructed her to start calling him ‘daddy’ and start doing things that were out of her ‘comfort zone’.

He continued to push her limits, asking her to complete despicable tasks. ‘I could be anything from masturbating to urinating in my underwear and putting it in my mouth to anal masturbation and it was very intense very quickly.’ 

The blackmail started that night, with Burns threatening to upload pictures to her friends and family if she tried to cut contact.

‘He was at the peak of his talents which happen to be sadistic abuse with paedophilic interests,’ an officer of the case noted.

Hayley was petrified of what he might do next, fearing what he might do if she didn’t oblige. 

Burns asked to videocall her, keeping his screen dark while he pleasured himself, instructing Hayley to use a sex toy on herself. 

‘I was on the floor in tears and he was asking me to call him daddy, telling me what was going to happen when he rapes me,’ she said.

‘I was under his control at that point,’ she said. His coercion of Hayley left her petrified to leave the house fearing what Burns might do next. It was during this period that she ‘lost a lot of friends’.

The coercion imposed on her by Burns left her with ‘depression and anxiety’. She said the ordeal had ‘damaged me physically in everyway possible’.

She described him as the ‘person who took everything away from me’. 

Hayley eventually broke down to her best friend, who insisted that she tell the police about what was going on. 

Because Burns initially pleaded ‘not guilty’ to his depraved acts, some of his victims were forced to provide evidence in court.

‘I was extremely nervous and paranoid because it was the fear of the unknown. I was on the phone to my partner at the time saying “I can’t do this”, Hayley said.

But she managed to pull through, saying she wanted to see him, ‘go down for a long time’.

‘He’s seen me in all my glory and I wanted to see him in all his dismay,’ she said.

A second victim, Sophie, who was identified as ‘victim five’, met Burns on the dating website Plenty of Fish, where she believed she had met a ‘genuine and attractive’ man who was claiming to be 25-years-old.

The two then began chatting on the app and before moving to WhatsApp, where end-to-end encryption made it easy for Burns to ‘evade the law’.

Similarly to Hayley, Sophie quickly noticed things took a toxic turn. She recalled one occasion when Burns asked her to write ‘sl*t’ on her chest in eyeliner. 

‘What he asked me to do made me feel disgusting and very vulnerable. Scary doesn’t seem to cover it,’ she said. 

She reread a text message that said: ‘Listen up you big a**, dumb t*t, f**k pig, you’re lucky I’m even talking to you. You’re eyes, I can see you’re pleading for a man.’

Burns went on to send her threatening messages, forwarding pictures of her loved ones and colleagues and claiming he would tell them what she had done if she didn’t comply with his sick demands.

He would demand videos of her ‘inserting things’ inside herself, at one stage sending 500 messages within just a few hours.

‘I really did think he was going to come to my house to kill me,’ she said. ‘I was scared I might die.’

Even after blocking his number, he would come back on another number. 

Finally, she called the police who told her there was nothing they could do without evidence – which Burns had deleted in anticipation. 

‘For a long time after that, I didn’t feel safe. What he wanted was vile but I was very lucky that he hadn’t honed his technique,’ she said.

Sophie was one of the eight victims who had to give evidence in court after Burns said he would initially plead not guilty – meaning victims had to ‘relive those moments’.

Giving a victim impact statement in court, Sophie described how the coercion left her a ‘shell of myself’. 

Between December 2019 and March 2020, Burns inflicted hell onto his victims, blackmailing them for his own ‘sexual gratification’. 

One of Burns’s victims was so traumatised by his relentless blackmail, which saw him upload photos of her online, that she was forced to drop out of university and move away with her mother and contemplated taking her own life.

The National Crime Agency’s lead investigating officer, Steve Colman, said: ‘Burns had become an arch manipulator of women for the sole purpose of blackmailing them to get images for his own sexual gratification.’ 

Burns was ‘very good as research’, the investigator explained, making him apt to finding out personal details about his victims which he would use to ‘blackmail’ them. 

‘He was sophisticated, I think he was confident he wouldn’t get caught,’ he said.

Burns was seized and arrested following an investigation by the National Crime Agency, with the assistance of the FBI.

NCA victim care officer Shaun Juriansz explained that Burns first arrived on police radar in 2018 when they were investigating the case of the serial online sex offender, Abdul Elahi, who had been communicating with Burns online.

The two then began working together, with Burns ‘picking up the craft’ from Elahi, who shared his ‘script’ for blackmail.

When Elahi was arrested, Burns continued to blackmail alone, growing ‘more evil and more deceitful’ than his predecessor. 

Officer Colman arrested Burns in 2019 on conspiracy to blackmail in connection with Ali but he put every effort into making out that he was one the one being ‘manipulated’ into blackmailing women.

He was released on bail and continued to reap hell on his victims online before being re-arrested two years later.

On his second arrest, police were shocked to discover that he barely had any imagery of his victims, but it later came to light that he had been using ‘cloud telephone numbers’ to cover up his the pictures.

He used a multitude of fake numbers, addresses and VPNs to cover his tracks, with officers convinced Burns thought he would ‘never get caught’.

Prosecuting, Kate Temple-Mabe said Elahi and Burns took delight in messaging victims simultaneously, telling the court that Burns would sometimes be messaging his mother and girlfriend at the same time as screen recording live sex performances over WhatsApp.

Burns, who appeared to be a ‘normal’ person on the face of it, had already been issued a Sexual Harm Prevention Order before he began coercing women online. 

‘He had a girlfriend, he had been employed in what you would say was a relatively mainstream employment role, albeit he was a registered sex offender, he had a relatively normal life,’ said Robert Slater, a senior investigating officer on the case.

Appearing again in court in January 2024, Burns was convicted of 41 offences in total; after pleading guilty to 39. 

Among the convictions were blackmail, causing a child to engage in sexual activity, causing sexual exploitation of a child and making and distributing indecent images of a child. The child in question was eight years old.

Burns denied two counts of causing a girl under the age of 13 to engage in sexual activity, but was convicted after a trial.

The judge said Burns showed ‘no remorse’ for his victims while in court. 

Prime Suspect: Hunting The Predators is available to watch on My5. 

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this story, you can contact Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222