YORK MAN SENTENCED FOR POSSESSING INDECENT IMAGES OF CHILDREN AFTER BLACKMAIL ORDEAL
A would-be nurse who was blackmailed with the threat of images of him being uploaded online is today a registered sex offender, York Magistrates' Court heard.Despite paying the blackmailer not to upload the images, Andrew Thompson was so afraid the pictures were online, he trawled the “darker regions” of the internet to see if he could find them, said his solicitor Kevin Blount.
“That led to something of an obsession with pornography.
He ended up looking at images he should not have been looking at as well as mainstream images.” Police found nine indecent images of children on one of Thompson’s devices during a raid on January 20, 2022.
The illegal pictures had been downloaded at least two months earlier.
Thompson, 37, pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing indecent images of children.
He was sentenced to be on the sex offenders’ register for five years and was given an 18-month community order involving 40 days of rehabilitative activities and 200 hours of unpaid work.
He was also ordered to pay a £95 surcharge and £85 in prosecution costs.
His arrest effectively ended his studies to become a nurse, a career that is now closed to him.
The judge emphasized that once images are uploaded online, they are there permanently and can never be fully removed, describing to Thompson how children in such images will grow up knowing their pictures are on the internet for all time, which must be a distressing thought.
