A paedophile who was snared by chat logs that showed him asking a teenage boy to send him sexual images has avoided a prison sentence.
Andrew Easton, 39, appeared in the dock at Aberdeen Sheriff Court where he admitted downloading and distributing disturbing indecent images of children to others on the internet.
Some of the horrific images shared by Easton featured newborn babies.
Cybercrime officers also found online chat logs, where Easton was found to be chatting inappropriately with a 13-year-old boy and asking him to share indecent images.
Accused had indecent images available to share
Fiscal depute Kirsty Martin told the court that on September 4 last year, police received intelligence from National Online Child Abuse Prevention group that an IP address belonging to Easton had been sharing child abuse material.
A search warrant was executed and a subsequent raid of Easton’s property uncovered two laptops, two mobile phones and two iPads.
One of the phones had the application Telegram on it, where Easton was seen to be trading indecent images of children with another person.
A total of 32 video files were then distributed, many of which were of the most serious category A.
The children featured in this footage were aged between four and eight years old.
In another group chat – entitled ‘Extra Excitement’ and which contained 63 members – cybercrime police found 132 pictures and 1,119 videos had been shared.
This footage was all deemed category, A, B and C and featured children ranging in age from newborn babies up to 10 years old.
The material was added to this group between March 17 and August 21 last year.
Chat logs showed a conversation with ‘boy’
Within the Telegram application, there was a chat history where Easton was found to be exchanging various close-up photographs of private parts.
In the chat, Easton refers to the person he’s chatting to as “boy” and confirms a previous communication between the two on the app Reddit, from which he is now banned.
The person Easton is chatting with asks him if he remembers what age he is, to which Easton replies: “13, aren’t you?”
Easton – who refers to himself as “daddy” – then asks the person to “send more, baby boy”.
In the dock, Easton pleaded guilty to one charge of communicating online with someone he believed to be a child.
He also admitted a second charge of downloading indecent images of children and a further charge of distributing indecent images of children.
‘Children are abused’ to create material
Defence solicitor Mike Monro told the court that there is an “acceptance” on his client’s part in respect of his guilt.
“He has been told by me and has been warned many times about the seriousness of these offences,” the solicitor said.
“Mr Easton has given into this knowing full well what he was getting into.
“He is not an easy person to get along with, but he is now in no doubt as to his predicament.”
Sentencing Easton, Sheriff Morag McLaughlin told him that she would deal with him by way of a community disposal as his offences “don’t quite reach the threshold for a prison sentence”.
However, she added: “We must treat this offending behaviour as very serious.
“These are images of child sexual abuse and there are children who are being abused to create it.”
As an alternative to a prison sentence, Sheriff McLaughlin made Easton, of Kennethmont, Huntly, subject to a community payback order with supervision for three years and ordered him to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.
She also made Easton subject to the sex offenders register for three years and ordered him to take part in a sex offenders programme.
As the sheriff made Easton aware of the conduct requirements he would have to adhere to, such as all online interactions being subject to monitoring, he stated that his “knowledge of technology isn’t that great”.
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