A taxi driver has been snared for distributing child porn.
Paul McDonald, 48, from Ayr, admitted distributing indecent photos of kids on November 8, 2020, as well as being in possession of indecent images of children on various occasions between January 2015 and November 2020.
McDonald admitted his guilt when he appeared at Ayr Sheriff Court on Wednesday.
Foul images depicted kids as young as five-years-old.
Depute Fiscal Mhairi Mair told the court: “Police Scotland received intel that devices were being used to send indecent images of children.
“At 7.30am on November 9, 2020, police searched the home and 17 devices were recovered. Fifteen of those were negative and returned to the owners.
“Two devices — a black iPhone and a silver computer tower — were found to contain indecent images of children.”
Ms Mair said the iPhone contained the Kick messenger app where McDonald created an account under a username to chat to multiple users.
McDonald sent on four links to three Mega folders (a cloud storage service) and one to Drop Box, with the links containing images of young teens, across the three categories A, B and C, used to class indecent images.
The silver computer tower recovered from McDonald’s home, which he shared with his partner of six years, was found to have 1284 moving images of content.
Of those 1,284 images, 727 were within category A — the most severe. And 415 were coded as category B, and 142 as category C.
