Having a stranger gain access to private, intimate images is a terrifying and constant worry for many social media users – particularly for children. That stranger then threatening to release the images brings a whole new level of humiliation.
A team of detectives shares how a four-year investigation put a rampant Snapchat sextortionist, who exploited dozens of underage victims, behind bars.
Listen to this episode and other episodes of Victoria Police's official podcast, Police Life: The Experts.
Transcript of Police Life: The Experts podcast, Season 4 Episode 1: Social media sextortionist exposed
Voiceover: This episode includes discussions about child sexual exploitation, coercion and control, as well as self-harm, suicide and mental health issues. Listener discretion is advised.
If this causes you difficulties after listening, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14. If you are a victim of these crimes, you can visit your local police station or call Crimestoppers on 1800 333 000. If life is in danger, call Triple Zero 000.
[Tense music plays]
Voiceover: This episode contains audio from both actual incidents and reenacted incidents.
Sergeant Byron Smith: That moment of finding the glove and you take a photograph of the glove.
[Camera shutter sounds play]
Sgt Smith: Maybe there's something inside it and slowly and forensically opening it up. And yeah, lo and behold, inside that glove that is the phone, and you realise that’s the number that matches the one that has been used.
Voiceover: This is the moment in September 2021 that Victoria Police investigators broke open a huge sextortion case. They had the phone that had been used to hack potentially hundreds of Snapchat accounts containing intimate images belonging to girls and young women across Australia.
It was the beginning of the end for a cruel and twisted predator.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Jake Fowke: Basically I take Snapchats and I sell them.
Voiceover: An investigation that spanned four years and involved dozens of victims began with a single complaint to the Frankston Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team, also known as Frankston SOCIT, in Melbourne’s south-east.
The complaints related to a person committing sextortion over Snapchat, a photo and video-sharing social media platform. Sextortion is a rapidly rising form of sexual exploitation involving online blackmail. It is when an offender gains access to a victim’s intimate images and threatens to share them unless the victim meets their demands.
Detective Sergeant Richard Thomson: This was really the first investigation that we had at Frankston SOCIT, I would say, that involved sextortion and certainly to this degree, this number of victims. So for us, it was certainly a learning curve in terms of the type of behaviour and the different types of investigative methods we'd need to employ to identify the offenders and hold them to account.
My name is Richard Thomson. I'm a detective sergeant at Professional Standards Command. So I'm a senior investigator. We investigate serious police misconduct and corruption.
Prior to that role, I was at Frankston SOCIT for seven years.
So it initially started with a couple of young females who attended Frankston Police Station to report that somebody contacted them on social media who they initially thought was their friend, asking for assistance.
Voiceover: The following re-enactment is based off statements from various victims.
[Ominous music plays]
Female voice actor: I got a message from a close friend of mine. She needed some help because she was in hospital. She needed me to receive a code that would let her access her phone.
Det Sgt Thomson: Codes would be sent to the victim's phone and the victim then provided them back to the person they thought was their friend, who was actually the offender. Those codes then would allow the offender to gain access to the victim's Snapchat account.
Female voice actor: I handed over what she needed and I was happy that I could help. So when I got a message saying…
Male voice actor: This isn’t [BEEP]. I hacked her like I hacked you.
Female voice actor: …I felt sick to my stomach. Absolute pure panic and distress. But then he sent another message saying…
Male voice actor: I’ve downloaded your entire My Eyes Only folder and it’s time to sell it.
Female voice actor: …I was terrified. I was only 14 and I spent hours wondering who he would send the images to. I never want to feel like that again.
Det Sgt Thomson: A short time after receiving the first report, I received another complaint from a female who had also been a victim of the same conduct by the same person. She had a call with the offender, and that was recorded.
Voiceover: The offender posed as the father of a friend, who was in hospital. He needed the victim - whose voice we have digitally altered - to give him a code sent to her phone which purportedly would allow him to recover his daughter’s phone.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Jake Fowke: I’m not really in the hospital. I’m not [BEEP]’s Dad.
Victim: What?
Jake Fowke: I’m only 16.
Victim: What?
Jake Fowke: I’m only 16.
Victim: But I thought I could trust you.
Jake Fowke: No, see I hacked [BEEP]’s account.
Victim: I’m just curious why do you feel the need to do this? To get money, is that why?
Jake Fowke: Basically I just started when I was 14 and I just started making money out of it and it was pretty good.”
[Recording ends]
Det Sgt Thomson: During that call, a piece of paper that was covering the offender's phone camera fell off, and for a short period of time the victim was able to record the offender's face and the background of the room he was in at the time of the offending.
The offender had a surgical mask on, but we could establish that he was a young male who was Caucasian with short brown hair.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Jake Fowke: That’s why I had to go run and get a face mask so you couldn’t see my face so you couldn’t see my face properly or I’d be fucked.
[Recording ends]
Voiceover: In this case, the hacker relented and returned the private photos to his victim without extracting payment.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Victim: OK well we’re going to go, thank you for giving it back ‘cause I just didn’t want to lose my family photos and all of that as well.
Jake Fowke: Yeah sorry, bye.
Victim: That’s OK, bye.
[Recording ends]
Voiceover: This brazen offender felt he could show mercy in this case. He felt untouchable but he had unwittingly brought himself undone by showing his face for just an instant.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Victim: Booyah, we got your photo motherfucker!
[Recording ends]
Voiceover: That is the victim’s response after being able to capture the offender’s image in the video call. It would prove to be a pivotal moment in the investigation.
Det Sgt Thomson: That was a huge moment to actually see this person's face or part of it for the first time and to hear his voice. And I listened to that recording probably more than a hundred times.
[Rewind sound plays]
Det Sgt Thomson: And it was obvious that he was you know very intelligent and well-practised at what he was doing, and very, very confident.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Victim: I don’t know why you’re doing this to me though. I didn’t do anything, I don’t even know who you are.
Jake Fowke: It’s just what I do.
[Recording ends]
Voiceover: Richard Thomson, known by his colleagues as “Thommo”, had a lot of work ahead of him. He was chasing a sex offender, who claimed to be 16 years old, hacking Snapchat accounts for money. Richard was yet to learn the identity of the suspect, or even his location.
An internal memo including the image of the offender, known as a circular, was distributed in an attempt to determine his identity. This came to define the efforts police went to in this investigation – even if it was a long shot, Richard was going to exhaust every avenue of enquiry.
Sgt Smith: This circular came around that our tactical intelligence officer had put together of a young male in a surgical mask. And everyone had a good laugh when they saw that and, ‘Yep, that's Thommo. Good luck with that.’ And I just knew that that's another rabbit hole that Thommo’s found himself down and we'll see what comes of this, I know if anyone can make something of it it'll be Thommo.
My name is Sergeant Byron Smith. I currently work at the Victoria Police Academy and the Foundation Training Conduct Unit. My role is as a sergeant educator, so I assist recruits coming through from the foundation level and in various aspects of their training there.
I was a detective senior constable same as Richard at Frankston SOCIT. We arrived at Frankston SOCIT around the same time in 2016 and so yeah, I did about seven and a half years as well there as a ground level investigator.
[Dynamic music plays]
Voiceover: Frankston SOCIT is one of 27 SOCITs that cover the entire state, made up of specialist detectives like Richard and Byron who are trained to respond to and investigate child abuse and sexual crimes, and support victims.
This case would become so big and complex it would require the involvement of JACET, the Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team, which is a joint initiative between Victoria Police and the Australian Federal Police. JACET specifically targets online child abuse, including the creation and distribution of child abuse material and online grooming.
Detective Leading Senior Constable Kellie Mervin: My name is Kellie Mervin. I'm a detective leading senior constable at the Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team and I've been with Victoria Police for 19 years and at JACET for 11.
I started my career before policing working for child protection. So I've always had a goal to protect women and children.
I can probably remember hearing the word sextortion for the first time, and us realising that there wasn't anything in place to combat this. It was a word, but what are we doing about it? Where's the legislation in relation to it?
Voiceover: It would be another two months before Kellie and JACET would become involved in this job as the true scale of the offending became apparent.
In August 2021, Richard began the legwork of identifying and locating the shadowy offender.
Det Sgt Thomson: I identified that it was a series of offending and the person responsible was very intelligent, very tech savvy and very well-practised, and had obviously been doing it for a long time and hadn't been identified and arrested. And I knew he'd be a challenge.
He was certainly very confident, and it was obvious to me that he thought he was the smartest bloke in the room.
I identified that the phone number the offender was using was registered to Queensland. And I also identified that another phone number also registered to the same person had also been involved in some other concerning behaviours in Queensland previously. So that I knew there was part of a series where conduct was occurring in multiple states.
Voiceover: Richard identified that a similar modus operandi was used in Queensland in 2020 where 13 complainants, often underage, also reported the same offences. An offender couldn’t be identified in that case but one of the Queensland victims did obtain a voice recording of the offender.
Det Sgt Thomson: So then I was trying to establish what the link was between, for this offending that was in Victoria and the offending in Queensland, and whether it was the same person or a different person, and trying to establish what role the person that the phone number was registered to had in this, if any.
[Ominous music plays]
Voiceover: The registered owner of the phone was not the male Richard had seen in the video taken by the victim.
[Recording of a video call between Jake Fowke and a victim plays]
Victim: Well I hope you realise we have recorded all of the messages you have said, and we have recorded everything.
Jake Fowke: OK.
[Recording ends]
Voiceover: The owner was in fact a 12-year-old girl.
Det Sgt Thomson: So I was trying to establish who that female was and was it that the actual person responsible, or was it a family member or a friend, or was the identification stolen to then purchase the SIM card?
After a short time I established that the mobile phone that he was using was given to a young female in Queensland as a gift, and that she had moved down to country Victoria and was living near where the offending phone was operating in Castlemaine.
We spoke to the person who'd purchased that phone for the young girl, and she said it had been stolen in a burglary in Queensland. That's when we established that her stepfather had very similar appearance to the offender as featured in the video. The stepfather of the young girl who had received the phone that was used in the offending as a gift was a male by the name of Jake Fowke.
Had no previous criminal history. We established that he'd been pulled over by Victorian police for speeding, and we obtained a copy of the body worn camera footage.
And when I looked at that and heard his voice, I was confident that he was the one responsible by matching it to the voice in the video obtained by one of the victims.
Voiceover: For police, it was a simple traffic stop. But for the investigation, it was a gamechanger.
Richard now had a suspect – 29-year-old Jake Dilan Fowke, plus a location, and recordings that linked Fowke to the crimes. There was also a pattern of similar possible offending in Queensland. The investigation was coming together very quickly.
Sgt Smith: How on earth did you do that? I remember it was a few of us who asked him 'cause we knew what he was doing, he was poring through records from Queensland. It was that they were hiding there in just a small bit of data that I credit him every day for picking that apart and finding it. It's a real skill and that that level of diligence to yeah, just work and work and work and know that there's other work not getting done while you're contributing your time to that one small chance of finding that data. It was honestly amazing to see. And no one really believed him when he told us he'd found it. Yeah, we were in shock to be honest.
There's a point in many investigations when you realise that this is the point of no return, that this is going to lead to something else, which is going to lead to something else. We realised that once we heard that voice is so distinctive, it is high pitched, it is quite unique. That's when you realise, not we've got him, you've got a lot of work to do before you get him, and a lot of evidence to collect to prove every aspect of it, and the young people have to go through a lot sometimes to prove it at court.
But that connection is what you need to be able to describe in the affidavit to ask the court for permission to invade someone's privacy to get into their business and into their home to search for their belongings. It was undoubtedly a match. And you know, there are those moments in investigations you get as an investigator and they're pretty cool moments.
Det Sgt Thomson: At that point when we had Jake as a suspect, we needed to make further inquiries to establish his involvement to our satisfaction, if any. At that time we focused on his workplace. And I matched the mobile phone activation and deactivation times with his electronic entry in and out of the building.
So I established that the phone the offender was using was located in Castlemaine and that it was being turned on for approximately an eight to nine hour period overnight and then being turned off all day.
And for months on end, it matched every single day. He would arrive at work, the phone would almost instantly be turned on. At the end it'd be turned off, and then he would leave the building.
Sgt Smith: So that's when I reached out in those early days to the factory and the workplace, built a connection with them early on, and trust, and also made it clear to them of sort of the type of offending that we were talking about.
Det Sgt Thomson: He was a fitter and turner at a food processing factory. And we also had the factory searched to try and find the room that featured in the video the victim obtained.
The video depicted a sign on the roof of the room the offender was in, but we couldn't work out what the sign said. And it also showed part of the floor and a trolley in the room. So we needed to find that room to link the offender to it, to assist in establishing the offender's ID.
Sgt Smith: I was really impressed with the business and their response to it and their willingness to assist us behind the scenes without alerting the offender, and really getting proactive and in their respect for the process that we had to follow in the secrecy we had to maintain. It became a great partnership.
And so when we finally met them when we executed the search warrant, it was yeah, it was it was a well-oiled machine by that point. They were doing as much as we were at that point to protect the young people involved because they were proactively pulling all these details from their records, their swipe access records, all of that.
[Active music plays]
Voiceover: The next task was to match the background shown behind the offender in the video taken by the victim to a physical location within the factory.
Det Sgt Thomson: So I had management search a very large factory to look for that room and they were unable to find it. So I had them go back and search it again. And I was on holidays, I remember I got a phone call from the manager to say, ‘We've done the second search and we've found it’. I was off for a couple of weeks and that was the best part of my holiday to get that phone call. So that's how invested we were in getting results for this job.
So the the floor had a very distinctive pattern and there were some other distinctive lighting features and signage etcetera in the video that were able to match exactly with that room.
Voiceover: Once the location of Jake Fowke’s offending was found, Byron began to get a clear picture of what he had been doing. Statements given by victims also demonstrated his modus operandi.
Sgt Smith: Yeah, it looked like he was very powerful in those moments of control over those young people, he felt powerful, and I was interested in the practical aspect of it. Where could you do this for the length of period, sometimes hours, that you're texting and doing video calls with these young people and not be observed by others? And it must just be somebody who has that free reign of their environment to be able to do that.
He knew the triggers, the trigger points, those words that would prevent the young people from reporting to police or reporting to their parents. That's one thing we realised, that he was very, it had been going on for a long time, or at least a short amount of time, but he was doing it every night and so yeah, honing his skill in that way.
A lot of it was threats to reveal. So you get into the first layer of a young person's Snapchat account and that might have some semi-intimate photographs or some photographs that they would be embarrassed about their parents seeing. But then just knowing that young people in that age group, if they have a My Eyes Only folder, there would be more material, worse material if you like, more intimate material in those My Eyes Only folders. And threatening to expose to their parents, to their friends, to their families those semi-intimate material and then using that to blackmail, if you like, the password to the My Eyes Only folder, where you've got naked selfies, naked videos, material of that nature. And then the next stage which is threatening to reveal that material unless they produce more material, live material, more explicit material.
[Ominous music plays]
Voiceover: It became apparent that Fowke’s motive was not money but power and control. He threatened to release the images unless victims agreed to perform humiliating live sex acts for his sick pleasure.
Sgt Smith: And the nightmare for us and which we've seen in other cases, which is the next, the only other next step to that, is contact offending, so meeting up with the young person and that's where, that was our major concern is the time, that that how long is it if it hasn't happened already, how long before they then make the next step into contact offending?
Det Sgt Thomson: I think it was obvious listening to his voice and watching the video call that was recorded of him that he was doing this for power and control and would likely be a very weak person. And that would be his response when I met him.
[Suspenseful music plays]
Voiceover: In September 2021, a month after this investigation began, it was time for Richard Thomson to look Fowke in the eye.
Det Sgt Thomson: One of my biggest concerns was that once we were satisfied we'd identified him and we went to his house and knocked on his door, it wasn't going to be him. I thought he'd be watching us through binoculars, laughing at us. That's how good he was. And I was relieved when he opened the door and it became obvious that it was him.
I introduced myself and told him why I was there, and it wasn't long before he turned green and fainted because he knew he'd been caught.
After the ambulance came and he was treated, it was he was assessed as being fine and not requiring hospitalisation. And then he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, I was expecting this’. I said, ‘What were you expecting?’
[Car sounds play]
Det Sgt Thomson: He said, ‘Oh I took my stepdaughter's phone to work to play games on, but thought I'd get in trouble, so I threw it out the car window’. And that was the phone that was used in the offending we were looking for.
I said to him at one point, ‘There's nothing that two grown men can't discuss, Jake.’ And that's when he started talking.
I asked him if he was prepared to take us out to the bush to show us where he'd thrown it, and he said he was.
[Car sounds play]
Det Sgt Thomson: So we went for a long drive out into the country and walked up and down some paddocks and couldn't find the phone. He was trying to blame it on someone else. Bear in mind he said he'd thrown it out the window a long time prior.
And he was watching our movements very closely. We didn't find the phone and we went back to the police station. But we already had the phone. Byron had seized it earlier that morning from his work locker.
Sgt Smith: As soon as that business opened in the morning, we were there, just a small team of us, myself and a sergeant, to search Jake's lockers.
We find his locker and the workplace gave us access to it and it's his tool locker. It's jam-packed full of tools as a fitter and turner would need, and searched the first row and not getting much luck, and that's when you start to question yourself. Is he our man? You picture where could it be that he would have access to during a shift? Keep searching. There's a glove, a white glove, there in amongst his tools and yeah, lo and behold, inside that glove that is the phone and next to it is the little pin that he used to change sim cards when he needed to. That was, yeah, a big moment.
You turn the phone over, you read the IMEI number, and you realise that's the number that matches the one that has been used in this offending and it's in a locked locker that only he and management have access to, and it's just that point of nexus between the offending and him.
And then we search the room where some of the offending occurred and you find those unique things in the room, the equipment, the sign on the roof, that matched what was behind him in that split second photo of him with his mask. Another point of nexus between that workplace and the offending.
And you're joining the dots and yeah, it's a great phone call you get to make to the investigator when we get to say, [Phone call style audio] ‘Regardless of how you go today, we're looking good. That phone you've been looking for, looks like we've got it. And so pretty much over to you. We're done here. Good luck with Jake.’
Voiceover: Even though Byron had found the phone, Richard had to play out the pantomime of searching the roadside where Fowke said he had disposed of it.
Det Sgt Thomson: If a suspect provides an avenue of inquiry to you it needs to be explored, even if you don't believe it's true. But I was really interested in watching his behaviour in terms of whether he thought we believed him or not. And I think after that pantomime on the way back to town in the car, that's when it really kicked in, I think, that something was going on.
Byron and I had a feeling that the offending was very extensive. And after we seized the mobile phone, that was forensically examined. Byron did a lot of work in that space in terms of examining the data on that phone and identified a large number of contacts were contained within the contact list.
Sgt Smith: That phone had been used to make contact with up to 400 phone numbers that Apple in the background very quickly checks, is this an Apple number, is this not an Apple number to distinguish when you send a send an SMS, is it going to be an SMS or is it going to be an iMessage?
And those pings, if you like, between phones were, we did a quick sampling of the phone numbers on that list and realised that they are either linked directly to young people or to, it just looked like a pattern of being real phone numbers. This isn't a spam operation, these are real people who have subscribed to phone numbers in Victoria and outside of Victoria, and we already knew enough about the MO that we knew that that data would be important. That means that he has made contact with up to 400 people and we were just scratching the surface.
Det Sgt Thomson: So we'd taken reports from 11 different people at that stage, immediately prior to his arrest. So it was appropriate on the day of his arrest to issue those charges relevant to those 11 people and then go on and make further inquiries as a result of having found that offending phone.
Yeah, so we interviewed him at length on the day of his arrest and he continued to deny that he had any involvement whatsoever in the alleged offending. So at that point we basically had a significant amount of evidence we'd gathered to indicate that he was responsible. He was denying it, and he'd been charged and he was awaiting his court date.
Jake stole his young stepdaughter's mobile phone to commit the offences and his stepdaughter and his wife couldn't find the phone and didn't know where it was, and he didn't ever own up to being responsible for taking it, obviously, and he allowed his stepdaughter to, you know, he was putting the blame on the stepdaughter for having lost her phone.
[Sinister music plays]
Voiceover: The investigators were stunned to discover that Fowke, while terrorising teenage girls, had children of own.
Det Sgt Thomson: I remember Jake saying to me when I was out the front of the house with him, ‘Please don't take me back inside, I don't want my kids to see me in handcuffs’. That's the only time I'd saw him genuinely show any characteristics consistent with decency, I would say.
Sgt Smith: Definitely a double life. You're on your own at the factory at night doing this horrendous behaviour and then you go home in the morning, no doubt there, before you go to bed you're at the breakfast table. You can't really imagine it, can you?
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin In my experience with dealing with child sex offenders is their ultimate ability to validate their own behaviour. It's almost textbook when you sit in an interview with a child sex offender, how they will self-justify what they're doing, or, on the other hand, play down what they're doing. If you bring up a concern about contact offending, ‘I wouldn't do that. I'm not a monster’. Well, you are a monster. You're just a different kind of monster.
But that is pretty much textbook, what you'll get from a child sex offender. Whether it's because they are making themselves feel better about what they do or they're, because they know it's wrong, or it's just a process they use to allow them to be able to offend and keep on offending. I don't know. But it is something that I would say 99 percent of them do when confronted by police in relation to their offending.
And it doesn't stop with us. If they have a partner, the story that they tell their partner about why police are involved will be a validation of their behaviour or an out-and-out lie about their behaviour. I don't know what Jake told his wife at the time in relation to it, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been the truth.
It's very common. And it basically is that if you, when you put that to them, and we always do in an interview, because if there is a child being harmed that we're not aware of, it's very important for us to find that out during interview and you, on a hope that if they're confronted with it that they will tell you. We will put that out there and that the response, the facial expression you get from them will be like, incredulous that, ‘How dare you put that to me? I'm not a monster, I would never do that’.
And them having to be reminded, ‘You are doing that’. You're just doing it to someone else's child. Whether it is actual contact offending or they have an image of a child being sexually abused, it's happening to someone's child and you're encouraging that by your own behaviour. And we will remind them of that during an interview. We don't let them get away with that kind of validation.
[Active music plays]
Voiceover: On that day, Fowke was charged with accessing and attempting to access child abuse material, unauthorised computer access, stalking, threatening to distribute intimate images and use of a carriage service to harass and menace. He was given bail with a condition he not access social media or leave the state. These charges were related to eight victims, but his phone suggested the number of young girls he had tormented could have been far greater.
Det Sgt Thomson: It was obvious that Jake had potentially been involved in much more offending, and that's why we contacted JACET and sought the assistance of their investigators who could investigate alleged offending not only in Victoria but interstate.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: We offer a specialised response to offending. What we do have is a more intense investigation that's normally going on, or a bigger investigation, so it was the only thing that I could work on for approximately eighteen months.
My sergeant at the time, Detective Sergeant Clark, he said, ‘This job's coming through from Frankston SOCIT’. He gave me a brief synopsis of it, and I said, ‘Let's go get this guy’.
When we saw the scope of the investigation, one of my first thoughts was how has a SOCIT investigator had the time to do this because it was intensive. And not only that, Frankston is a long way from Castlemaine.
So once we got our head around all the information, we had a spreadsheet created. Our intelligence officers then had to try and put names to those phone numbers. Because we're dealing with what we would be expecting, they were all going to be children at the other end of that phone, we couldn't just pick up, take that phone number and call the phone and say, ‘This is the police we want to talk to you about this’.
So the first step was to get, to identify that phone number and then find out who the parent or an adult attached to that phone number actually was as well. Once we'd established that, we then had to start reaching out to the 400 plus phone numbers.
The other issue you have is you've told a parent about this offending and asked them, ‘Please do not go and speak to your child about this’, because we need to get the child's account from the child without any kind of influence from their parent. So that's also a lot of pressure on a parent to be told that as well.
So we did that over four hundred times. Initially I would say about half of them said that they didn't want to be involved. I would say 95 per cent of the people that we spoke to said, ‘Yes, this has happened to me’. Sadly, some of the time they said, ‘Which time are you talking about?’
That was a realisation for us that this stuff is happening to children daily. And some of the kids were just like, ‘Yeah, well this is this is how it is on social media’.
So we had to be careful, sometimes we were taking reports from kids about new offending that wasn't even related to this offending, and making sure that we were actually talking about the stuff that Jake Fowke had done, not someone else.
We saw Jake Fowke learning about his offending and refining his offending. We could actually see sometimes when he'd try something and it didn't work. So he shut that down and went on to something else. But his offending was textbook.
So he became more sadistic, more threatening. Like what he'd been doing previously wasn't working for him what he needed from it anymore, and he was taking it further and further and further with these girls until he got to them, where there was a threat to kill at one stage. Yeah, it's just out and out threats to these girls. And he did then start reposting the stuff, the intimate images that he'd got from them, he did start reposting it onto their social media accounts.
There was one particular child that I spoke to and I, to be honest, became quite emotional when I was taking the statement from this girl. She wasn’t telling us about the My Eyes Only account that he’d hacked into. And when she was questioned a bit further, she opened up and said, yes, she did have that account. And we asked her outright, ‘Did you have nudes in that account?’ and she said, ‘No, I had images of myself self-harming’.
He accessed that account, looked at those photos and then mocked her about the fact that she was self-harming at some stage. That could have easily turned into a suicide by that child. And he had no care in what he was saying to her that that could be the result of his behaviour.
I couldn't wait to catch Jake Fowke for many reasons. I wanted him to realise that he wasn't the smartest person in the room.
So we started a second investigation, intelligence driven investigation, so that we could mainly find the child abuse material. We wanted to make sure that we could say to these victims, we've got this, we've got the content, it's contained and it's not going to be shared, which is obviously a massive concern for all these girls. And also for us, we want to find it so we can charge him.
So the two arms of the investigation started, so one, the taking over of the investigation from the Frankston investigation, and the intelligence-driven investigation, which is when we started working hand in hand with Frankston SOCIT out in the field.
[Suspenseful music plays]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: And in January 2022, we did a combined second arrest of Fowke where we and it was to try and elicit from him where this stored child abuse material was.
Voiceover: Fowke’s life was falling apart by this time. His wife had left him over his offending and had taken an intervention order out against him.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: On the 26th of January 2022 we travelled to Bendigo, where Richard and I were going to arrest Fowke again for...I'd taken some statements from some victims, so we had new charges to lay. I gave those statements to Richard and that's what the arrest was for, to give him the opportunity to give an account of the offending against these new victims.
Det Sgt Thomson: Predominantly was, our visit was for JACET's investigation, but we didn't want him to know that JACET was involved, so we let him to believe that it was still in about my investigation and how Kellie was working with me from SOCIT.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: And I was a Frankston SOCIT investigator.
[Audio from January 2022 police interview of Jake Fowke plays]
Det Sgt Thomson: Are you right mate?
Jake Fowke: As good as it gets.
Det Sgt Thomson: No worries. This a recorded interview between Detective Acting Sergeant Thomson and Jake Fowke conducted at the Bendigo Police Station on Wednesday 26th of January 2022. Also present is my corroborator.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: Detective Senior Constable Kellie Mervin.
[Police interview audio ends]
Det Sgt Thomson: I think if he'd if he'd found out that JACET was involved, it certainly would have caused alarm. He would have thought that a much bigger, more specialised work unit was now investigating him. We wanted him to think that the local SOCIT detectives were still investigating something that was, it's just Thommo again from Frankston.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: Our fear was destruction of evidence. So that's why the JACET arm of it was kept under wraps at that time, and because we were running the intelligence arm of the investigation, which if he'd known that, our fear was that he would destroy the evidence that we were actually looking for as part of that leg of the investigation.
[Tense music plays]
Voiceover: Fowke was charged with hacking three more Snapchat accounts and also with breaches of bail. He had created a profile on a dating app and also had a Facebook profile in his name.
[Audio from January 2022 police interview of Jake Fowke plays]
Jake Fowke: I fully assumed dating apps was OK. Because like, since our first arrest, I’m like, I already know like, we’ve already had our first court date and I’ve been talking to my lawyers and stuff. I already know, like I know I fucked up.
Det Sgt Thomson: Yeah. What do you mean, mate?
Jake Fowke: Oh like with, whatever comes from, whatever my lawyer decides, wants me to do I’m with that. So I was like, the last thing like, I’ve got that IVO against me so I can’t see my kids. So it’s like, as if, like I don’t want to put myself in more shit.
[Police interview audio ends]
Voiceover: This change of heart was all too late. While Fowke appeared to show some remorse to investigators on this occasion, he was showing his true colours elsewhere.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: During the course of this part of the investigation, we received information from a witness into conversations that Fowke had had with them regarding his offending. And that conversation, Fowke relayed to the witness that he had made over a hundred thousand dollars worth of money from selling child abuse material that he'd collected online from female victims.
He admitted that he knew the age of the victims during the offending, that he'd been doing it for a long time, and that if he got out of jail, or when he got out of jail for whatever he was facing for Richard’s charges, that he would continue to offend, amongst other things.
He also admitted to some things in relation to how he was refining his offending. He said that during his first offending at one stage, the cover had fallen off the camera on his phone, and he thinks that the person saw him. And so from now on, he was going to make sure he covered the phone camera better.
I was really interested to hear that Fowke wanted to brag about his offending. The fact that he was telling someone else that he knew of a child's age and was willing to commit these offences against them to try and get some kind of credibility from this other human that this was a good thing, it showed to me what I always thought that he was, which was a coward and pretty weak and lacking somewhere in his personality and how he thought about himself. So it was this bravado of pretending that he was a bigger man than he actually was. He was just a weak coward child sex offender.
We couldn't find evidence to prove that he'd made money from it and the rest of it was truthful. So whether he made money or not, every other point that he made to this witness was a fact and a proven fact, except for the fact that he'd made money. We couldn't prove that part.
[Dynamic music plays]
Voiceover: On February 28, it was time for Kellie to reveal that JACET was on to him. But this surprise visit did not go to plan.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: So he's on bail for Richard's charges. We were planning to execute this warrant a week before the final court date where he was going to plead guilty to Richard's charges. So en masse JACET travels to Bendigo to execute this final search warrant. Without revealing too much about how we do things, a car drove past his house to make sure that he was there, and he was. So that we're all good, this search warrant's going to happen at 6am tomorrow.
And then one of our tactical intelligence officers calls us and says he's just crossed into New South Wales. His phone has just crossed into New South Wales. So within the time that someone had driven past, seen the car there, he'd got into his car and had left the state breaching his bail conditions. And we don't know whether he's taken off for good or not. He's no longer in a relationship with his wife. There's not really anything holding him to that address and he's off to New South Wales, leaving JACET detectives in Bendigo with nothing to do.
We could see that his phone was travelling through New South Wales to Queensland, and then we just had to keep an eye on it to figure out whether he was coming back into the state and be basically coiled springs in the office.
Given that he's from Queensland, we can see that he's in there, maybe he's not coming back and we'll have to get him extradited. So we waited until I think it was about the 12th of March 2022, the phone started moving back towards Victoria. So we were getting ready to travel back to Bendigo to effect an arrest.
While we were watching his phone, we saw it stop for a period of time in New South Wales, and we think that he's having a sleep. But what had actually happened was he'd fallen asleep while he was driving…
[Car crash sounds play]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: …and crashed into a back of a truck. So his car was written off and he did this out of the front of a person's house in Forbes, New South Wales. We don't know that at the time, we just see that it's stopped.
Voiceover: Two weeks after leaving Victoria, he gets back home.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: He comes back into Victoria, we can see that from his phone and he goes to work. And we are there in the afternoon, set up around his house, waiting for him to come back.
We think he's going to be in his vehicle, because that's the vehicle that he left in. Then all of a sudden a vehicle drives into the street that he lives in. Someone says, yes, that's him in the passenger seat. That vehicle drives over us, we're parked in a side street, turns around, and a member of the JACET team stands in the middle of the road, clearly identified as a police officer with his vest and tabard and everything on and tells the vehicle to stop. He's a passenger in the vehicle. It stops slightly, the police member goes to open the door, and as he does, the car takes off at speed down the road.
So a police pursuit starts. It's a very quick police pursuit, it's around the corner where the driver of the vehicle, who has no idea really what's going on except there's lights and sirens behind her. And as we now know, he was telling her, ‘Drive, drive, drive’, so she did.
She pulls over, he is extracted quickly from the car. Out of his pocket falls a mobile phone. He's then arrested and taken back into the property, and the search warrant there starts. That car is then searched, and in the glove box is another phone. The owner of the vehicle says, ‘Not my phone’, and then she makes a statement to say that he's put that phone into the glove box after he's told her to drive off.
So her statement then reveals that he has seen the police officer standing in the middle of the road and said to her, ‘Drive, drive, drive’, affecting her to then take off from the police, and then has then, he's carrying two mobile phones, puts one into the glove box of that car.
[Audio from March 2022 police interview of Jake Fowke plays]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: It is 6.10pm on the 14th of March 2022. My name is Detective Senior Constable Kellie Mervin, also present with me is my corroborator.
Detective Senior Constable Kylie Murcott: Detective Senior Constable Kylie Murcott.
[Police interview audio ends]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: The day that we're doing that interview, my colleague and I, another female and I, are interviewing him in the house, and this is when I became really aware of his hatred of women, his disrespect of women. He again thought he was the smartest person in that room. He was cocky, arrogant, dismissive, there's nothing that my colleague and I could do to him.
So I started putting things to him about his breaching of bail. He couldn't he couldn't care less. But as we were sort of saying to him, he was saying black, we were saying white. This is the evidence, he'd say this, we'd say no, this is the evidence we've got. He would just shrug it off and say, you know, he didn't care. To the point where my colleague had said to me, ‘What really annoys me is he doesn't care. We're not rattling him. He's not shaken.’
And I said, ‘No watch, watch when we put another thing to him that he doesn't know we know’. He stops, he's quiet, and his head, the cogs are turning, he's thinking, ‘How do they know? How do they know this?’ and slowly realising that we knew so much about what he was up to and that this had taken on a whole, a whole other level.
When the breach of bail by having a Snapchat account was put to him in the interview, he said the same response he gave to Richard and I on the 26th of January, he said, ‘Oh, I didn't actually understand that that was social media. I didn't get that that was social media, I didn't understand’.
And I said to him on the 14th of March, ‘Has anyone ever explained to you what social media is before?’ He said, ‘No one, no one's ever explained that to me’.
On the 26th of January, we went through the same process where his reason for breaching bail was, ‘I didn't understand, no one explained that to me’. And so I sat in that interview on the 26th of January and went through what social media is, Facebook, all the things you've done now, you can't do.
So when he did the same thing on the 14th of March, it was one of those good moments for me where I just said to him, and I did slide my glasses down my nose and I looked over them and I said to him, ‘Do you not recognise me? You might not recognise me, but I was with Richard on the 26th of January, and I explained that to you then. So you know full well what social media is’.
Wasn't the smartest person in the room.
One of the warrants that we had for him was that he had to provide us with the passcodes for those phones. So I was putting those orders on him. ‘You must provide me with the passcode.’
[Audio from March 2022 police interview of Jake Fowke plays]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: The first one we will ask for is the PIN code for the phone that we’ve got today. Are you able to provide that to us?
Jake Fowke: No.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: Pardon?
Jake Fowke: No.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: Do you understand there is a criminal penalty in relation to not providing the passcode to that phone?
Jake Fowke: I don’t remember what it is.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: You don’t remember what it is?
Jake Fowke: No.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: When was the last time you used your phone?
Jake Fowke: I’m not sure.
[Police interview audio ends]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: This kind of response to everything. We had a break in the interview and went out looking at both these phones, like, okay, let's just put in the passcode he used on his phone that we got off him on the 26th of January. And it worked.
So we're in, we're now in both the phones. So we then could see that on those phones he had Snapchat accounts in his own name, photos of the car crash in Forbes, New South Wales, the phone number of the person whose house he'd crashed in front of.
From all this, we could establish that he'd, we figured out that he'd crashed his car in front of this lady’s house. We got a statement from her saying that this nice young man named Jake Fowke had crashed outside her house because he'd fallen asleep while he was driving his car, and she called a tow truck and got his car towed, and then he had dinner at her house with her daughter at the dinner table, and then someone had come and picked him up and driven him home.
And to show his kind of personality and the way he dealt with being faced with black and white evidence, I said to him, ‘Where's your car?’ ‘I crashed it’. ‘Where did you crash it?’ ‘I don't, I don't know’. ‘Well, where's what state was it in?’ ‘Victoria’. And I put to him that he'd left the state. ‘No I didn't, I didn't leave the state’. So then when I said to him, ‘I have a statement from the person whose house you crashed, crashed in front of’. ‘Oh that's her word against mine’.
So this is the kind of person we're dealing with. No matter how much evidence you're saying you've got, he just shrugged. When I told him that he was going to be taken back to Bendigo Police station that day and remanded, his response was, ‘Well good, that's what I wanted’. So it's just this sort of arrogance. ‘I don't care. You've actually, you can't do anything to me’.
[Sinister music plays]
[Audio from March 2022 police interview of Jake Fowke plays]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: You’re under arrest for breaching your bail.
Jake Fowke: OK, sweet.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: You’re not obliged to say or do anything but anything you say or do will be given in evidence.
Jake Fowke: Yep.
[Police interview audio ends]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: When we did do go through that remand process, it was, as Richard said, the first time you saw him have a sense of decency. The first time I saw him drop that facade and have some vulnerability was when he was asking to be released on bail. And he started saying things like, ‘Well, please, I need my job, I need my job to pay for my defence for all this sort of stuff’.
So he'd had this massive bravado and then had to actually drop that in front of us, which I guess was probably humiliating for him to actually beg for mercy, to try and get bail, which he didn't get bail. So he was remanded on that day on the 14th of March 2022.
The phone that he had with a Snapchat account in his name had the SIM card of a female from Bendigo in that phone. And he'd also taken over her Snapchat account. When he found himself in possession of a girl's phone who'd lost her phone in the pub the night before, he had then accessed her Snapchat account and was using her Snapchat account to contact other people and also had a Snapchat account in his own name operating at the same time.
So it was very clear to us while he was waiting to plead guilty to Richard's charges, he was about to start the same offending again, with ground zero being the girl who owned the phone.
So on the 14th of March he was charged with handling stolen goods in relation to the phone that the victim somehow lost out of her handbag at the pub a couple of nights before that. So breaches of bail, the handling stolen goods, hindering police for the driving off.
Voiceover: The earlier charges Richard had laid on Fowke resulted in him being sentenced to 18 months in prison in January 2023. It was during this time that Kellie was methodically gathering evidence from victims across Australia to lay more charges against him.
[Sombre music plays]
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: It took us such a long time to contact all those people and get... 'cause once we got them, then we had to get the statements written, then we had to get the statements sent to Western Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia and have them signed.
So in July 2023 he was charged with 262 charges from JACET. There were stalking charges, using carriage service to transmit child abuse material, using a carriage service to solicit child abuse material, procuring child abuse material, threats to kill and other charges that were the same charges that Richard had charged him with in relation to him hacking the social media accounts.
The 262 charges were related to approximately 70 victims, 70 extra victims that we'd been able to obtain statements from. And that's not to say the other people that we spoke to weren't victims. It was just 70 victims that we were able to obtain statements from. So there's 262 charges related to those victims alone.
Det Sgt Thomson: So Kellie and I were in sort of fairly regular communication about the progress of you know, her investigation. Again I was just really, really impressed at all the time, effort, energy that Kellie and her colleagues put into their investigation and it really is a credit to them.
I was so thrilled that it was them that took it over and got the result they did. It was brilliant. You know, we've developed really positive working relationships as a result of this investigation as well. We didn't know each other before and you know, now we're doing a whole range of things together. Including a couple of, you know, side projects to enhance child safety through the education department as well. So a whole range of positives have come out of it. It's been, you know, a really fantastic part of my career, this investigation, it really has.
Sgt Smith: When you hear those numbers of how many victims that they had to take statements from and how many charges came out of that, I just go straight to thinking of Kelly and the spreadsheet she's got to manage on her brief and how huge that must have been. It was taking, it was Thommo's work times 10. It was the scope of it. It was sort of it boggles the mind when you know how much work goes into an individual SOCIT investigation with one or two victims.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: So on the 27th of June 2025, Jake Fowke faced sentencing for his, for this part of the offending where he received a sentence of five years and six months with a three year non-parole period. So he's currently serving that sentence.
There are a lot of other victims out there from Jake Fowke. We haven't captured the whole scope of his offending. And that just because this investigation is over, it doesn't mean that a victim shouldn't come forward, with this investigation or any other investigation, to let police know what's happened to them. Their offending or what's happened to them is a separate situation and can be investigated and police can take action if we have the evidence.
And I hope that victims can understand that they will be supported when they come to police in relation to this kind of offending. We're getting better at it. We're getting better at understanding the intricacies of it and we can do something about, we can definitely do something about it.
Det Sgt Thomson: It was certainly a big learning curve for us and I think technology's obviously advancing now so rapidly that every time, you know, a new investigation commences there's another element of it that is new and different that we have to get our heads around as operators of that type of technology, and to a degree where we can actually investigate crimes where it's used, which is a whole new level.
[Emotive music plays]
Voiceover: The investigators were shocked to learn how common this type of offending was in the social media world and saw an opportunity to prevent other victims falling prey to criminals like Jake Fowke.
Sgt Smith: It was a moment where I started pivoting towards, what can I do with this knowledge of the offending type and the impact on the victims and the young people in their bedrooms alone? Can we start sharing more information with the education system, with teachers and principals and wellbeing staff in schools so they become aware of these methods of operating?
That did lead me to, I felt as a detective, after ten years as a detective, sort of popping like my head out of the mine shaft and realising, what else is there that I can do? And started putting towards that education area. So that's why we've started our work with schools and sharing even if it's an active case, finding a way to share these trends with local school staff to just make them aware that it's happening, and also for them to share with us what we don't know about what's happening as well.
Voiceover: Byron has also used his role at the Victoria Police Academy to continue make a difference.
Sgt Smith: And in professionally, sharing case studies like this with the recruits, and they know, and especially the young recruits, know more about this technology than we do, how to gather evidence. Learning from the young people throughout the investigation, really, they showed us how to gather the evidence and the importance after that investigation, how much we knew about how to gather evidence from Snapchat and the other social media companies, and how we need to work with them on their processes to secure that evidence if we can't find the phone.
We were lucky this time, although Richard made his own luck really, but yeah, that was a big thing for me and it just sort of made me think of different areas and education and how police have a role, and the counselling services and support services have a role, but education will be the key, 'cause Jake needed every child to not speak up for it to work. And getting that message out there in whatever way we can, ‘Tell someone you trust’.
Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin: One of the inadequacies I felt for myself in this investigation was we couldn't help the victims more. On the grand scale of it, when I'm talking to these girls on the phone, I want to make sure they've got their welfare services in there, be able to talk to them every day if they need it to be, and that's one thing that we weren't able to do very well in this because of the scope. And also we're investigators, we're not welfare officers, but because my background's in welfare, like I have this need to give them more than I can.
So moving forward with anything like that, I'm just more aware that we really need to make sure all those things are in place for victims. We make a phone call, we get evidence from them, we do try and link them in with services, but sometimes that's not enough, especially if you're dealing with a teenager who actually might need someone to talk to all the time. And some of these victims would call me a lot and then you can't be there for them.
So for me it's being very aware of the impact of this offending on the on the girls. And I say girls because it was girls in this situation, but this happens to young boys as well. It also happens to adults. It's the same MO. It's the same stuff that happens to adults as well.
I think as the court system and policing understand more about this offending, the ramifications of it will become worse and worse. I think that Jake Fowke did say at some stage during his validation process for himself, something in relation to it being, it was just for power, it was just it was sort of no big deal about what he was doing.
That making a girl stand in front of a mirror and take a nude image of herself and send it to you isn't nothing. And when court system understands that more, as police understand that more, the sentences for this are just going to get bigger and bigger. You will be held accountable and that becomes easier once everyone has an understanding of what's actually going on in this offending.
Voiceover: For Richard Thomson, there was great satisfaction in locking up a crook who had believed he was beyond the reach of the law.
Det Sgt Thomson: I often wonder what his what his reaction to all this would be in terms of him being tricked by the police. And perhaps now he has a sense of, to some degree, how he made these young victims feel in tricking them. We effectively did the same thing to him, used his tools against him.
Voiceover: Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.
Your host is Belinda Batty.
It was written by Adam Shand.
It was produced by Adam Shand, Jesse Wray-McCann and Cassandra Stanghi.
The senior producer was Ros Jaguar.
Voice acting in this episode by Mat Dwyer and Tayla Thomas.
Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.
Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.
Executive produced by Charlie Morton.
This podcast was created by the Media, Communications and Engagement Department at Victoria Police.
To learn more about the work of Victoria Police, go to police.vic.gov.au.
Police Life: Our people, our stories
Police Life: Our people, our stories is where you'll find Victoria Police’s podcast and in-depth articles about police, protective services officers and support staff across the state.
Updated