A South Yorkshire Police police officer, Marie Thompson, has been incarcerated after impersonating a paedophile hunter and attempting to extort a suspect to conceal her gambling debts.
Most child molesters with no previous records are getting less prison time than this woman.
PC Marie Thompson, 29, employed a fraudulent email address to extort £3,500 from the individual apprehended on suspicion of possessing obscene photos of minors, subsequently misleading him by claiming she had been unable to identify the offender when he reported the matter to her.
Marie Thompson, a former employee of South Yorkshire Police, admitted to charges of blackmail and obstructing justice at Leeds Crown Court.
On Thursday, she received a 40-month prison sentence.
The court was informed that Marie Thompson was the officer overseeing a South Yorkshire Police investigation concerning the individual she apprehended in October 2022.
He was interviewed and released under investigation, but then received an email demanding that the money be paid into a bank account, which was signed “Paedophile Hunters”.
It stated that the payment would “ensure that information remains between you and us” and that information about his arrest had been provided to them.
“As an organisation which works to protect children from people such as yourself, we therefore ask you to donate to us,” it added.
Later that same day, the man’s partner (his partner who knows he is a paedophile and stays with him) received a text message stating that a reply was needed by the end of the day.
However, they did not pay and instead reported it to Marie Thompson, who worked in Doncaster.
She said she would investigate the matter, but falsely endorsed the crime report to say he did not want to pursue a complaint.
The court heard she told “several lies” in her pocket notebook entries, including changing the mobile number used to text the man’s partner to conceal the fact that it was her own personal phone number.
The man later received a second email with the subject “I’m so sorry”.
“I came to drop something off for my mum and overheard you talking. I never told a soul and never intended to,” it read.
The court heard this was “a further attempt by Marie Thompson to cover her tracks”.
The court heard that Marie Thompson left the team in March 2023, and her caseload was subsequently transferred.
The officer who took over the case visited the man, and he mentioned the blackmail attempt, stating that Marie Thompson had not been able to discover the culprit.
When the officer checked the number from the text message sent to the man’s partner, he found it was the number Marie Thompson had used on her police vetting form.
A victim impact statement from the man, who was later given a suspended prison sentence for the indecent image charges, said: “I feel furious towards Marie Thompson; she was trusted in her role as a police officer in a department that comes into contact with probably the most vulnerable persons in society.
“For her to know the position I was in and use it against me is unbelievable.”
The court heard Marie Thompson suffers from a severe gambling disorder and was in considerable debt at the time of the offence.
South Yorkshire Police stated that, following her guilty plea, a Regulation 13 notice – issued to probationers deemed unfit to serve as a police officer – was served on her at the direction of Chief Constable Lauren Poultney.
Marie Thompson subsequently resigned from the force on 16 October.
We struggle to get images of serious non-white paedophile child molesters, but they were happy to provide this one to show they are cracking down on their own (Good one).
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