Watch above: Police believe the man charged with luring and blackmailing the B.C. teen may have done the same thing to dozens of other victims. Stuart Greer reports.
The lawyer for the man authorities accuse of tormenting B.C. teenager Amanda Todd said it’s entirely possible someone else may have hacked his client’s Internet addresses to exploit people.
An international investigation, launched after Todd took her life in October 2012, led police to arrest 35-year-old Aydin Coban in January.
Police accuse Coban, who has dual Dutch and Turkish citizenship, of luring Todd online and pressuring her to commit sexual acts on a webcam and then blackmailing her with images of her exposed breasts.
RCMP in B.C. laid five charges against him on Friday, hours after Dutch news broadcaster Omroep Brabant published details of the arrest.
READ MORE: Amanda Todd’s mom: ‘This is truly a day that we’ve been waiting for’
Defence lawyer Christian van Dijk said he wouldn’t discuss whether Coban is denying the charges.
But, he said the evidence against his client is flimsy.
At the moment, it’s only based on data such as IP addresses, MAC addresses and web pages, van Dijk explained. “The question is, is it possible that there are other people than my client who used those kind of addresses?”
Van Dijk said that’s his conclusion as to what happened with his client.
“Maybe we need to find some experts, into logging into wireless networks,” he said.
Van Dijk described his client as “a very decent and nice man to speak with.”
But police allege Coban pressured girls, boys and even adults to perform sexual acts on a webcam and then used the images to blackmail them.
Mathijs Pennings, the journalist who broke the story said investigators are looking for “maybe 30 or 40 more” possible victims.
READ MORE: More children identified as possible victims of man charged in Amanda Todd case
Those victims are believed to be in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. But there could be others in other countries, Pennings said.
Pennings said Dutch officials got a tip from a U.S. Internet provider that Coban may be involved in such activity.
When police went to his rented bungalow, in a trailer park in the town of Oisterwijk, they seized his computer and router.
That’s when they determined he was a suspect in the Todd case and dozens of other incidents.
The number of potential victims could go even higher than the 30 or 40 cases authorities are looking into now.
“They haven’t looked through the data yet and they’re still contacting persons that come up in the investigation,” he said in a Skype interview with Global’s Stuart Greer.
He said investigators must continue going through all of the data they have and reach out to potential victims, before they can determine the total number of people involved.
Pennings said he’s also trying to track down possible family members or other people who may know Coban, but not much is known about him.
He was born in the Netherlands, but is of Turkish descent.
“He had no wife or children… He liked his loneliness,” Pennings said. “Not many people knew him.”
*With files from Stuart Greer
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