A judge at Bradford Crown Court has jailed a man who sought to corrupt a 12-year-old boy not realising he was communicating with an undercover police officer.
Over a three-week period in June and July 2022, Callum Cameron exchanged online messages with the boy that escalated until he was instructing him how to masturbate and encouraging him to imagine performing sex acts on men.
Prosecutor Emily Thorbjornsen said the undercover officer, posing as a boy, joined a group chat called “Northern flirty fun”.
Cameron made contact, claiming he was 45, and the officer sent a direct message back identifying himself as 12.
Initial innocuous conversations progressed until Cameron wrote that he liked performing sex acts on young males and that the boy “would love it”.
Cameron’s messages then became increasingly sexual.
He was arrested on July 6, 2022.
After being arrested his phone was seized and analysed and found to contain prohibited images of children, including cartoon images of children as young as four engaging in sexual activity, as well as internet searches for indecet images of children and bestiality.
Cameron, 54, of Bradford, had also participated in highly-inappropriate online chats.
In interviews, Cameron admitted chatting to a young male and that his words had “got a bit raunchy” but denied an interest in indecent images of children.
He said the conversations were simply role-play.
He later pleaded guilty to attempting to cause a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity and attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child.
The court heard that he had no previous convictions.
Mitigating, Mike Walsh said Cameron had accepted his wrongdoing and described him as “the author of his own misfortune”.
He said: “There are reasons to hope that he will reduce the likelihood of offending in the future given the massive effect that these proceedings have had on him.
“The chances of this defendant finding himself before the court again are limited.”
Sentencing Cameron to 16 months’ imprisonment for attempting to engage in sexual activity plus a further six months, to be served concurrently, for attempted communication, His Honour Judge Ahmed Nadim said his actions “were calculated to corrupt and groom an individual that you believed to be a 12-year-old child.”
He added: “You engaged in a disturbing and predatory pattern of behaviour in the anonymity of the internet.
“Your initial messages displayed a caution. This you swiftly abandoned. You thereafter deliberately and systematically steered the conversations towards explicit sexual topics.
“All of this was done for your own sexual pleasure.”
He ordered Cameron to register as a sex offender for 10 years and imposed a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for the same period.
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