Finland’s largest sex crimes case has opened in Pirkanmaa District Court, with a 28-year-old man facing charges over alleged offences involving hundreds of boys contacted through Snapchat.
The trial is expected to continue until at least the end of the year, with the court scheduled to sit on 45 separate days during the autumn and winter. The unusually long proceedings reflect the scale of the case, which currently involves 361 identified victims.
Police have warned that the final number could be significantly higher. Investigators believe there may be as many as 900 victims in total, with around 530 potential victims still unidentified.
The boys identified as victims were between 9 and 15 years old at the time of the alleged offences and are from different parts of Finland. Because of the number of people involved, some legal representatives are attending proceedings in Tampere, while others are taking part remotely from courts elsewhere in the country.
The defendant is appearing remotely from Kanta-Hame District Court. He faces charges including aggravated sexual abuse of a child, sexual abuse of a child and aggravated distribution of images depicting a child in an offensive manner.
The alleged offences took place on Snapchat between 2019 and 2022, according to police.
Investigators say the defendant presented himself as a woman when communicating with children on the platform. He allegedly persuaded them to send photographs and videos and then used screen-recording software to save the material without the children’s knowledge.
The amount of material involved differs between victims. Police have said that one boy sent approximately 160 videos to the defendant.
Investigators do not believe the defendant met the children in person. The alleged offences therefore took place online, although police suspect he was already familiar with some of the victims through sporting activities or his work as a substitute teacher.
Attorney Jyri Kilpi, who represents 77 of the alleged victims, said in his opening statement that the defendant used lists of underage sports teams to identify potential victims and gather information about their interests and hobbies.
Kilpi also described the impact the alleged offences have had on the children and their families. Some of the boys were reportedly unable to tell their parents what had happened, leaving families to deal with feelings of shame and regret alongside the investigation.
“All responsibility lies entirely with the adult perpetrator, not the victim,” Kilpi told the court.
The proceedings also follow an earlier conviction involving the defendant.
According to information obtained by Yle, he was sentenced to three years in prison in 2023 after Kanta-Hame District Court found him guilty of aggravated sexual abuse of a child.
That case concerned a 14-year-old male student while the defendant was working as a substitute teacher at a primary school in the region. The court heard that the defendant had also exchanged a large amount of sexually suggestive material and messages with the boy.
The earlier investigation became a turning point in the current case. Police seized the defendant’s phone and found thousands of sexualised images and videos involving children, leading investigators to examine a much wider set of suspected offences.
The scale of that investigation has now brought one of Finland’s largest criminal cases before the courts. With hundreds of identified victims and hundreds more potential victims still being investigated, the trial is expected to take months to complete.
