A Melbourne bodybuilder has pleaded guilty to 47 charges of blackmail after he posed as a woman to convince guys to strip and perform sex acts online, then threatened to make video footage of them public on gay websites.

23-year-old Shawn Rye (pictured) from Croydon even threatened to put pictures and videos of guys on their Facebook pages, alerting their friends and family to their sexploits if he didn’t receive hundreds of dollars from them.

The Age reports that Rye would pose as a “young and sexually available woman” and trick the guys – some local, some overseas in the UK, America and Canada – into stripping and masturbating, promising “she” would then do likewise.

Telling them he’d recorded video of the encounter, Rye would then demand between $100 to $500, saying he’d leak the footage if the money didn’t come through. It worked – he got almost $8,000 from various men before the police caught up with him.

He’ll be sentenced next week, and may face up to five years in jail.

A former youth champion bodybuilder, Rye was unemployed at the time of the incidents and said he needed the money to pay for the $300 worth of protein powder he drank each week.

Here he is ironically dressed as a cop…