An Australian man has been sentenced to 129 years in a Philippine prison in a child molestation involving victims as young as 18 months, a prosecutor said on Wednesday.

It was the second conviction for Peter Gerard Scully, who is already serving a life sentence on initial charges of rape and white slavery.

Experts warn that the Philippines has become a global hotspot for child sexual exploitation, aided by poverty, fluency in English and high internet connectivity in the country.

“I hope this sends a very strong message to all perpetrators, all traffickers, that crime really doesn’t pay,” Merlynn Barola-Uy, a regional prosecutor in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro, told AFP.

A court in Cagayan de Oro returned the verdict on November 3 after Scully and his three co-defendants reached an agreement to negotiate.

They were charged with 60 crimes, including human trafficking, child pornography, child abuse and rape.

Scully’s friend, Lovely Margallo, was sentenced to 126 years in prison. Two others were sentenced to more than nine years in prison.

Victims and their families have accepted the terms of the agreement and consider it a “sweet victory,” according to a statement on the regional prosecutor’s Facebook page.

“They all want to end this dark phase in their lives and move on,” the statement said.

The victims included an 18-month-old girl and a child whose body was found buried under the floor of a house Scully rented, Barola-Uy said.

“This is a great victory, not only for us prosecutors at the Justice Department, but most importantly, a great victory for the victim survivors,” she said.

Scully was arrested in Malaybalay, another southern Philippine city, in 2015 after fleeing Australia in 2011.

He had come to the Philippines to avoid fraud allegations in his home country.

He then started a cybersex business and filmed teenage girls from impoverished families while he was having sex with them or using sex toys, investigators previously said.

The videos were allegedly sold to customers in Germany, the US and Brazil.

Most of the people who pay to watch these types of sex videos are abroad, where thousands of children may be abused, often with their parents’ consent, authorities say.

The United Nations Children’s Fund said in 2021 that the Philippines is one of the world’s top sources of child sexual abuse materials.