An Aberdeen man was handed unpaid work after he “fell into the trap” of a paedophile hunter posing as a teenage girl online.
Alan Merchant, 44, was snared after a man set up a fake Facebook profile posing as a 14-year-old girl called Stacey Price and added him.
Merchant then sent “Stacey” sexually explicit images and requested pictures from her.
Yesterday at Aberdeen Sheriff Court Merchant was handed a three-year supervision order and 180 hours of unpaid work.
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Sheriff Morag McLaughlin also imposed a requirement to undertake the Moving Forward Making Changes programme and ordered him not to have any unsupervised conduct with children under 16.
He was made subject to the notification requirements of the Sexual Offences Act for three years.
Merchant, of Wallace House, Aberdeen, previously pled guilty to sending repeated written sexual communications to what he thought was a child and to causing what he thought was a child to look at sexual images between December 16 and 17 last year.
Defence agent Mike Monro highlighted that his client had not actually interacted with an underage girl. He added: “He accepts he fell into the trap and responded in the sexualised manner he did.”
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