Stephen Borsellotti was a taxi driver with a ‘sordid sexual interest in children’ who downloaded indecent images after joining a social media group chat.
He viewed the images on the Kik Messenger app and they included victims as young as ‘eight or nine’ years old.
Police attended his home in Church in September 2018 to conduct an ‘intel visit’ after they received information about the ‘potential sharing of an [indecent] image’ on social networking site Tumblr.
Officers recovered seven category A images – the most serious – nine category B and 10 category C images from his mobile phone and showed some of the victims ‘in pain and grimacing’.
Stephen Borsellotti told police that a link to the illegal images was shared by another person on the Kik group and he clicked on it.
When interviewed by the probation service, the defendant admitted that his partner had also ‘smashed his phone’ after finding other indecent images ‘some years ago’.
Stephen Borsellotti, 59, pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.
Stephen Borsellotti was given a two-year community order with a 40-day rehabilitation activity requirement, a two-month curfew, ordered to sign the sex offenders register for five years and given a five-year sexual harm prevention order.
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