July 2020 Paedophile snared by online group after first messaging a real nine-year-old girl A paedophile was snared by an online group after he began messaging a real nine-year-old girl. Ryan White posed as a 15-year-old to start chatting with the youngster on Instagram but her parents became aware and they sought help from Geordie Chasers to catch him. Newcastle Crown Court heard that a member of the group posed as the youngster and, despite clearly knowing her age, White’s messages soon turned more sick and sinister. The 22-year-old loner began asking the “girl” to perform an intimate act on herself and told her he had friends her age that were having sex. The pervert also asked her for explicit pictures and told her “My privates say I love you”, Neil Jones, prosecuting, said. After a day of messaging, members of Geordie Chasers tracked down where White worked in Embleton, near Alnwick, Northumberland, and confronted him. He was arrested and, when his mobile phone was seized and searched, three sick photos of children were discovered. Now, White, of Greyfield Estate, in the same village, has been locked up for 27 months after he admitted attempting to incite a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity and possessing indecent images of kids. Mr Jones said that the real girl’s parents became aware White had been messaging her in late 2018 and they went onto her Instagram account. They discovered he had sent her a picture of naked male genitals and so contacted Geordie Chasers in January 2019. A member of the group then carried on the conversation pretending to be the youngster and White’s messages soon turned sexually explicit. Mr Jones said: “The charge relates to the fictitious girl only. The aggravating circumstances are the age of the child. She was very young, indeed. There’s a significant age disparity between her age and the age of the defendant and the contact with the girl started when she was a real person.” After he was confronted and arrested, White told officers his account had been hacked but he soon changed his story and admitted having a sexual interest in young children. The court also heard that the images on his phone were category C, the least serious kind. Locking White up, Mr Recorder Gordon said: “I need to do all I can to protect the public and, indeed, smaller children from harm in the future. “The Pre-Sentence Report assesses you as being high risk to smaller children, particularly girls of prepubescent ages.” White was also made subject of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for 10 years and was made to sign the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years.