Ashfield man couldn’t remember sharing ‘thousands upon thousands’ of child porn images

Police arrived at Ashley Payne's home after crime agencies flagged two cloud accounts linked to his IP address, said Katrina Wilson, prosecuting.

He was arrested in January last year and his mobile was seized, but he denied any suggestion that he had accessed indecent material.

“He indicated he spoke to girls on Snapchat but they were always 18 or over,” she said.

“There were thousands upon thousands of files - some were accessible, some had been deleted and there was evidence some of the links had been deleted.”

She said 47 per cent of the 71,000 files analysed by police contained indecent material before the investigation was discontinued.

Nottingham Crown Court heard some of the material featured children as young as three-to-six-months-old showing “graphic levels of distress.”

When Payne was interviewed for a second time he accepted the cloud accounts might contain indecent material, but denied having a sexual interest in children.

He couldn’t explain why he did this and claimed he had epilepsy and memory problems.

Digby Johnson, mitigating, said Payne, of previous good character, has since made contact with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a UK-wide charity dedicated to tackling child sexual abuse by preventative measures.

“The number of images involved seemed to show a real level of perversion," he said. “But a fair way of putting it would be that Mr Payne was obsessed and locked in his own little world.

“There is certainly some issue as to the hardwiring of his brain. The volume of the material is troubling. It's the obsession of the collector. He has not offended again for 21 months.”

Payne, aged 27, of Stonechurch View, Annesley, admitted possessing and distributing indecent images of children, as well as possessing extreme and prohibited images, at Nottingham Crown Court.

Sentencing him to 28 months in custody on Tuesday, Recorder Michelle Heeley KC told him: “These were the very worst types of indecent image.

“You actively sought out other users and shared them. Ninety per cent of the images found were indecent. You initially claimed to have no memory of what you had done.”