A MAN who tried to arrange meetings with two under-age schoolgirls in Chelmsley Wood after grooming them online turned up to find he had walked into a trap.
John Mottram of Lane Avenue, Birchills, Walsall, pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to three charges of attempting to incite sexual activity with a child.
When he was arrested John Mottram accepted that he knew the girls he thought he was exchanging sexual messages with were said to be just 11 and 12 years old.
The 49-year-old was jailed for two years and four months, and was ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years.
Prosecutor Matthew Barnes said that in June Mottram began taking part in online chats with people he believed were two young girls named Nina, aged 11, and 12-year-old Katie.
His conversations became sexual, and he sent one of them a picture of him exposing himself and talked about having sex with them, encouraging other girls to come with Katie when she met him.
Mr Barnes said: “There was an element of deviousness with what he said to both girls, telling them there were a lot of fake people on the sites.”
But in fact it was Mottram who was the victim of fakes – because the girls did not exist, and their profiles had been placed on the site by a group who had set out to trap paedophiles.
And when he turned up after arranging to meet Katie in Bosworth Drive, Chelmsley Wood, it was members of the group who turned up instead to confront him.
When he was arrested he admitted setting up a profile about three weeks earlier and said he had been talking to older women who had been ‘talking dirty’ to him.
Of the two girls he believed he began chatting to, he said he knew them to be aged 11 and 12, and agreed he had engaged in sexual communication with them and discussed them bringing friends to the meeting.
Mottram accepted he had driven to Chelmsley Wood after arranging to meet Katie, but claimed he did so to see if she was real, and that he was ‘not going to do anything.’
Rebecca Wade, defending, said: “The defendant accepts the offences he has admitted are abhorrent.”
She pointed out that the offences were attempts to meet, rather than actual meetings, because the girls did not exist, but accepted that Mottram did not know that at the time.
Miss Wade argued: “A sentence of immediate custody will punish him, and anyone listening to this case will think he richly deserves it.
“But it will not provide him with the help he requires and which will protect the public in the future.
“He has been in custody for over three months, and if he was released without any intervention, the public may well still be at risk.”
Proposing a suspended sentence with a sex offender programme, she added: “He has taken the first step by admitting responsibility, including the element of sexual gratification, and he will be forced to address the real reasons behind his conduct.”
But jailing Mottram, Judge Sally Hancox said it was not possible to pass anything other than an immediate sentence.
