Home   News   Article

Crime in the North East: Paedophile 'hunter' admits guilt


By Alistair Whitfield

Easier access to your trusted, local news. Subscribe to a digital package and support local news publishing.



Click here to sign up to our free newsletters!

A man who downloaded vile images of babies and young children being sexually abused claimed he did it to try and trap paedophiles.

But Nicholas Ferguson now faces a jail sentence as his alleged activity was still illegal and he admitted several offences at Inverness Sheriff Court today.

Sheriff Sara Matheson heard that Ferguson sent screenshots from an obscene video of a child performing a sex act on an adult to an Elgin man he suspected could be an abuser.

The Moray man then reported it to police after being engaged in sexually explicit online conversations with Ferguson who used his own name in February, 2019.

During the conversations Ferguson said he had "done stuff with children" and also claimed to have had sex with children as young as five.

Fiscal depute David Morton said Ferguson was traced to an address in Dalneigh and a laptop and phone were seized.

The phone had the same number as that used to contact the Elgin man.

During his police interview, Ferguson told officers he "was hoping to try and lure people into admitting things in the hope of finding predators".

Ferguson was arrested and charged but released on bail in April, 2019.

Then, on August 30, 2019, Ferguson was filmed on CCTV in a city centre takeaway, physically assaulting a woman's son by pushing him to the side of the head.

This was in breach of a special bail condition not to have any contact with children aged under 16.

A further mobile phone was taken by the police and analysed.

Experts discovered he was using social media to send or receive indecent videos and images.

A total of 494 images were recovered from one device, with a third of them being of the most obscene type.

Also 165 videos were found, mostly in the same most serious category.

The court heard Ferguson used a cloud storage based in New Zealand.

Further interrogation of another device which Ferguson had obtained in an Inverness shop discovered 129 images and 53 videos.

These were created while he was on bail, between September, 2019 and December 2019.

Again most were in the highest category of depravity, involving boys aged between two and 10 subjected to bondage and sodomy.

The Sheriff was told "their horrendous distress could be heard".

Ferguson of St Ninian's Drive, Inverness pleaded guilty to assault, two breaches of bail, downloading, possessing and distributing indecent images and making an indecent communication.

The 31-year-old, who has no previous convictions, was immediately placed on the Sex Offender's Register.

Sentence was deferred until January 19 for a background report.

Defence solicitor advocate Shahid Latif said he would reserve his comments until then.


Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.



This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies - Learn More