A serial sex offender has been jailed for a second time after he was lured into sex chats with a fake 12-year-old girl.
Former Dundee bus driver Ronald Young thought he was talking to the child when in fact it was a vigilante group set up to catch sex offenders who groom young girls.
He was snared twice in five months by two different groups, Dundee Sheriff Court was told.
Young was arrested after police uncovered the chats on his laptop which had been seized from his home in Montrose in 2016.
However, police did not examine the device until months after he had already been jailed for another incident.
When they were finally analysed they revealed twisted conversations Young had with a paedophile hunter from another vigilante group five months earlier.
Now retired, Young – who has previous convictions for possessing indecent images of children and attempting to arrange a meet-up with an underage girl in London – has been handed a 10-month prison term over that incident.
Fiscal depute John Adams told Dundee Sheriff Court the messages, exchanged in June 2016, made it clear Young believed he was speaking to a schoolgirl.
Young, originally from Dundee, further admitted possessing computer devices when a sexual offences prevention order, imposed after one of his previous convictions in 2014, banned him from doing so without approval.
Young, 65, a prisoner at HMP Perth, pleaded guilty to breaching a sexual offences prevention order on June 13,2016 and between October 13 2015 and December 10 2016.
In January last year Young was jailed for 27 months after travelling to meet someone pretending to be a 13-year-old girl for sex.
Sheriff Alastair Brown told Young: “You have got to get it through your head that if you have anything to do sexually with or in relation to children under 16 you are going to keep going back to prison.
“The bottom line is children are off-limits and you have to stay right away from anything to do with them.”
Sheriff Brown also placed Young on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.
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