Anthony Stewart 43

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A 43-year-old Preston man caught in a sting by paedophile hunters has escaped a prison sentence.

Anthony Stewart, from Deepdale, who was snared for sending perverted messages to “decoys” he thought were 14-year-old girls, was given a suspended sentence when he appeared at the city’s Crown Court.

Judge Heather Lloyd told him he would have gone straight to jail had his targets been real children and not website warriors posing as underage girls.

And she condemned his “utterly vile and predatory behaviour” in trying to contact youngsters through the social media sites Facebook and WhatsApp.

The court was told an online child protection group called Elite set out to catch Stewart after he initiated sexual conversations with two of their decoys called Molly and Imogen.

Both pretend teens told him right away they were 14. He told Molly he was 25, but then claimed he was 19 when he started messaging Imogen.

He had started out communicating with Molly on Facebook in July 2023 and took the lead in their conversation. He asked for photographs of her, asked if she had a boyfriend and also whether she met up with people in person.

The Elite group responded with a fake image of a mid-teens girl and he replied saying she was “pretty.”

Quite quickly Stewart began to ask if she used any other social media sites because, claimed the prosecution, the filters on other platforms allowed the exchange of images of naked body parts.

The messaging switched to WhatsApp in December and he became “a little more direct and forward” in his conversations with Molly. The court was told the messages became more and more explicit, resulting in him sending images of his private parts and urging Molly to do likewise.

In conversation with the other decoy Imogen, which extended over a shorter time, he was equally vulgar and at one point told her he was “as horny as ****.”

The Elite paedophile hunters decided at that point to report Stewart to the police and handed over all the material they had about the sting. When he was arrested at a house in Preston he answered “no comment” to all questions.

The court was told Stewart had a “long list” of previous convictions, but none of them of a sexual nature. He had no fewer than 13 appearances in court for being drunk and disorderly.

In this case he pleaded guilty to two charges of attempting sexual communications with a child.

Barrister Beverley Hackett, defending, said her client was “deeply ashamed, as he should be.”

She revealed he needed help with long-standing alcohol problems. It was said that at one time he had been drinking between eight and 15 pints of beer a day.

“He is aware of the serious situation he finds himself in,” she told Judge Lloyd. “Whilst he does have convictions, he doesn’t have anything in the past which is similar to these offences.

“He has suffered in terms of his mental health and there has been a history of suicide attempts, most recent of which was in January.

“He has no excuses for what he has done, for going online in the way he did and for making the communications that he did.”

But Miss Hackett added there were real reasons to believe he could be rehabilitated if he was allowed to remain in the community.

Passing sentence, Judge Lloyd told him: “When you were repeatedly in contact with Molly and Imogen you believed that you were in communication with 14-year-old girls.

“Molly said she was not sexually experienced and that must have excited you because it clearly didn’t deter you. This was utterly vile and predatory behaviour.

“You said you were using the internet in this way because you were bored and you denied any sexual interest in children. But both are clearly untrue. You are clearly sexually attracted to children.”

The judge said she had her doubts Stewart could be rehabilitated, but decided she would give him a total of nine months in prison, suspended for two years.

She also ordered him to take part in 20 days of rehabilitation work, six months of alcohol treatment. He was also given a sexual harm prevention order for 10 years.

And she added that the only reason she had not ordered an immediate prison sentence was “because these children were not real children.”

“If they were it would have been a much longer sentence and been immediate.”