March 2009

Chat room paedophile persuaded children to strip

A WEBCAM paedophile who targeted chat room schoolgirls was finally caught in an undercover police sting.

Craig Pearson hid his identity as he surfed the net for young victims.

The 23-year-old management trainee, who used the name Pip Top, tricked a string of teenage girls, persuading them to strip and perform sex acts in front of webcams.

Pearson, who was also downloading depraved images of children as young as one, used a sharing programme on his computer to spread some of the footage.

But an undercover officer began logging on to chat rooms as part of a covert police operation codenamed Misprint.

He posed as a paedophile to befriend Pearson who told him his special interest was 11 to 14-year-olds.

And when police raided Pearson’s home in October 2007, they were able to recover scores of appalling photographs and video clips he had tried to delete to cover his tracks.

Some were from category four on a special one to five scale used to grade the severity of child sex material.

Jailing Pearson for 18 months and ordering him to register as a sex offender for life, Judge Richard Lowden said:

“The category four material is as bad as I have ever seen.

“I would be failing in my duty if I did not impose an immediate custodial sentence.” Pearson, of Collywell Road, Seaton Sluice, was also given a 20-year sex offences prevention order and disqualified from working with children after admitting possessing and distributing indecent images.

Judge Lowden told him: “It is abuse for you to disguise yourself in order to gain entry to chat rooms to encourage children to engage in sexual behaviour.

“This is not just a question of you having pictures.

“These are people being abused. The courts have a duty to try to reduce this kind of abuse of children.”

Pearson, who worked for a Blyth-based engineering firm, had met at least five girls before he was arrested.

He had also exposed himself in a mobile picture message he sent to one of those youngsters.

“He has an abiding sense of shame over what he has done,” said Stephen Rich, defending.

“It is apparent at the time there was a naivety and immaturity in the development of certain features of his personality.”