Bradley Thomas Strauch: Gumtree fraudster pretended to be wealthy professor to child he showed sex material

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. A South West man masqueraded as a rich music professor when he sexually exploited a 14-year-old girl, a court has been told. Bradley Thomas Anthony Ellis Strauch committed the crimes in WA in 2016 but they have only now caught up with him, after he spent most of the past seven years in jail in Queensland. Upon release in October 2023, Strauch was extradited to WA and charged with 21 child sex offences. Most of the counts were encouraging a child of or over 13 and under 16 to engage in sexual behaviour, and exposing a child under 16 to indecent matter. Strauch’s District Court of WA sentencing was told he used Facebook to exchange explicit messages with the teenager, who identified as a girl, and swap indecent images he had encouraged her to make. Then aged 22, Strauch described his “beachside house and Mercedes-Benz car”, and offered to pick her up from school to have sex. Strauch believed he had previously communicated with the girl on dating app Grindr and arranged to meet her but he didn’t show up. However, the plans to meet continued and he insisted it had to be at a hotel, saying: “I can’t be seen in public, I’m a teacher, you’re a juvie.” He also showed the teen a “manufactured e-contact” claiming he was a professor of musical theatre at Edith Cowan University. Defence counsel Hamish Glenister said his client was “just effectively living out a fantasy online” and “simply enjoyed the attention”. Strauch didn’t have “any active intention to actually engage” in the sex he proposed despite seeming “to have had the opportunity to do it on at least two occasions”, the lawyer said. Strauch also offended against a 12-year-old boy in WA, the son of a man he had met on Grindr and was renting a room from in WA. The court was told that when Strauch was babysitting the boy one night, they engaged in an explicit conversation on Tonic — a messaging app used alongside the game Minecraft. He then encouraged the boy to come into his bedroom to watch a pornographic movie and commit an indecent act. The child told a relative some of what happened the next day and Strauch was arrested. But he was given bail and later that year went with a new female housemate to Queensland. When the woman returned to WA while Strauch stayed on the east coast, she saw on her laptop — which she had loaned to Strauch — the explicit message exchanges with the 14-year-old girl on a Facebook page. She reported him to Queensland Police, but he had already been arrested for reportedly pretending to be a doctor when he stole cars from Gumtree advertisers. According to local media at the time, he would turn up at the seller’s home in scrubs, embroidered with his name, and hand over fake money transfer receipts but the cash was never sent. Sentencing Strauch for the WA crimes, Judge Felicity Zempilas said he had a dysfunctional upbringing in a home where “there were no sexual boundaries”. He had acknowledged that he had a sexual interest in pubescent males, she noted. Judge Zempilas handed Strauch three years and nine months behind bars, with eligibility for parole. Sexual Assault Resource Centre 1800 199 888 Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800