Bay of Plenty Snapchat predator Raveen Saily admits further offending

Snapchat predator Raveen Saily has pleaded guilty to new charges related to grooming and indecent communication with an 11-year-old girl.

Warning: This story deals with details of sexual assault against young people, and may be distressing.

Snapchat predator Raveen Saily was on bail, awaiting a rape trial , when he filmed a 13-year-old Rotorua girl performing a sexual act on him.

Now it’s been revealed the 23-year-old sent that video to an 11-year-old Auckland girl he’d met through Snapchat, whom he’d asked to be his girlfriend, and was also grooming.

Yesterday in the Tauranga District Court, Saily pleaded guilty to grooming for sexual conduct with a young person, indecent communication with a young person and distributing objectionable material.

They all relate to the Auckland victim.

He will be sentenced in December, along with charges related to the sexual violation of the 13-year-old victim from Rotorua.

A police summary of facts reveals Saily met the 11-year-old through Snapchat in May 2024.

At the time, he was awaiting trial on charges of indecent assault, rape and sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection, for an attack on a 16-year-old girl at the Arataki Community Centre in Mount Maunganui.

He had also met that teen on Snapchat, where he used the alias “John”, and was found guilty by a jury, on all six charges, in August last year.

While awaiting trial, Saily continued to contact girls on Snapchat.

This was despite bail conditions banning him from accessing the internet, having contact with anyone under 16, or leaving his Pyes Pā home at night.

When spoken to by police about his contact with the 11-year-old, he told them he “probably did do these things, but he cannot remember specifics due to the volume of girls he was in communication with, and the time that has passed since his incarceration”.

Raveen Saily is serving a term of imprisonment, after being found guilty by jury of the rape and sexual violation of a 16-year-old.

‘Too young to have a boyfriend’ says victim

Saily never met the 11-year-old victim in person; they lived in different cities and communicated on Snapchat.

Their relationship was discovered when the girl’s mother looked at her phone, saw the messaging and reported it to police.

The police summary of facts state that during a video call, Saily asked the girl to be his girlfriend. She told him she was only 11, and too young to have a boyfriend.

However, Saily continued to pressure her until she agreed, and their conversations continued over text and Snapchat, and audio and video calls.

She became “increasingly emotionally dependent” on Saily, believing she was in a relationship with him.

Saily told the 11-year-old he loved her, while encouraging her to send him sexually explicit images.

He would ask her to “get naked”, and tell her about his sexual preferences, describing himself as “freaky”.

He told her she would be a “good SCAT girl”, which describes sexual arousal from faecal matter.

He would direct her to places in the house away from her caregiver, while on video calls, and instruct her to perform sexual acts while he watched.

He told her he wanted to drive from Tauranga to have sex with her.

In June 2024, he filmed the 13-year-old victim from Rotorua performing a sexual act on himself, and sent it to the 11-year-old.

Offending discovered at ‘routine traffic stop’

The video of the 13-year-old was sent between June 27 and August 27, 2024, with the video found by police when they examined Saily’s phone, after arresting him.

Last month, Saily pleaded guilty to charges related to the 13-year-old, including grooming, sexual connection with a young person, sexual violation, and possessing objectionable material.

He had added that girl on Snapchat in May 2024, claiming he was only 16. He groomed her over a month and encouraged her to send him sexually explicit photographs.

They met at night in June 2024, and he drove her to several private locations where he sexually violated her, at times as she cried in pain.

She repeatedly told him to stop, but he told her to shut up. It was her first experience of sexual intercourse.

This offending was only detected after police pulled the pair over during a routine police stop and became suspicious about their age gap.

When being dealt with by police at the traffic stop, the defendant indicated he was not aware of the girl’s age and tried to stop her from speaking to the attending officers.

Because of the significant age difference between the complainant and the defendant, she was taken to her home and spoken to alongside her mother.

That traffic stop happened on Saturday, August 24, just before Saily’s Tauranga trial began on August 26.

Sex with ‘naive’ 16-year-old at knife-point

During the Tauranga trial, the court heard how the girl didn’t know Saily’s proper name, and he didn’t use it on any of his social media profiles.

They’d met up at Mount Maunganui’s Bayfair mall, and then went for a walk to the nearby Arataki Community Centre.

There, the girl said she had been forced to perform sexual acts after Saily threatened her with a knife. He then went on to rape and violate her.

Saily claimed it had been consensual, but the Crown said this was “utterly fanciful”, particularly given the “naive” girl had no sexual experience and it was the first time she’d met up with a boy alone.

Saily is currently serving a sentence of nine years and two months’ imprisonment for the Tauranga attack, and will be sentenced for the offending against the 13-year-old and 11-year-old in December.

Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.