The Sunday Times December 24, 2006
Parents tricked into submitting child photos
Daniel Foggo
POLICE are investigating a couple who obtained thousands of photographs of young children by posing as the owners of a fictitious child-modelling agency.
Isabel Portaro Rubinsteinn and her boyfriend, Matthew Burns, set up a bogus agency and invited dozens of parents to send in pictures of their children, many of them babies, to sign up for modelling shoots.
The assignments never materialised, however, and it has now been established that Portaro Rubinsteinn has used aliases to pose as a variety of people with a view to obtaining pictures of children.
The couple?s reason for using subterfuge to acquire the vast collection of pictures is unclear, although parents fear they may have been passed to child pornographers who can superimpose faces onto existing hardcore images in order to resell them to paedophiles over the internet.
On websites last week, dozens of mothers denounced Portaro Rubinsteinn, who until October lived in Farnborough, Hampshire, after realising she was one of the owners of the ?agency? Fine-Kids.com.
One mother, Rachael Perry, said: ?I am really worried because she?s got pictures of my children. She has actually been targeting my daughter, asking for more and more pictures of her. It is very upsetting.?
Another mother called Sarah, who declined to give her surname, said: ?We are all so scared now. She got mothers to give her so many pictures. We all thought Fine-Kids was a legitimate modelling agency.?
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a government office set up to deal with internet-based crime against children, has been investigating for the past two weeks. Last week it handed the case to the Metropolitan police?s Project Sapphire unit, which specialises in cases of rape and sexual assault.
Portaro Rubinsteinn began using deception to garner her collection of child pictures in March, when a company calling itself AMP Design contacted genuine child modelling agencies claiming to represent a ?nannying website? which wanted to shoot pictures of suitable children for its site.
The agencies were asked to send sample pictures of children on their books possibly matching the brief for the assignment.
Portaro Rubinsteinn, a 24-year-old Brazilian, has two young children by Burns, a South African IT technician. Both are understood to have arrived in Britain in 2004, when Portaro Rubinsteinn registered a firm at Companies House under a false address.
Later Portaro Rubinsteinn, using the name Brook, expressed an interest in taking child models abroad for assignments and gathered hundreds of pictures. She gave a false address for her company and later cancelled the shoot.
A short while later, while using her real identity, Portaro Rubinsteinn set up a website, childmodelling.net, with a message board for interested mothers. She offered advice on child modelling and falsely claimed to have secured work for her son and daughter.
Mothers were encouraged to send pictures of their children and post messages on the site.
Last month a new agency, Fine-Kids.com, appeared on the internet, given credibility to Portaro Rubinsteinn?s claims that she had signed up her own children with it. Thousands of pictures were e-mailed to it by mothers wishing to register their children, but no real ?assignments? materialised.
Portaro Rubinsteinn and Burns live in an apartment in a middle-class district of Sao Paulo, where last week they denied any connection to Fine-Kids or any involvement in child pornography.
Portaro Rubinsteinn said: ?If I did something wrong I?ll fix it. No one?s perfect but we have nothing to do with child porn.?