A man snared by a paedophile hunter posing online as a 12-year-old girl has been banned from using the internet and unsupervised contact with children.
Roderick Burns, 53, exchanged sexually explicit messages with who he thought was a girl called Katy, telling her he would show her how to have sex.
However, he was actually communicating with a member of the Defending the Innocent group and was confronted on his doorstep in Kirkcaldy by the Wolf Pack Hunters group.
At Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court Burns was placed on a community payback order with supervision for three years and on the sex offenders register.
The order includes a ban on internet access and unsupervised contact with children unless approved by his supervising order.
Sheriff Grant McCulloch told Burns: “Clearly, a man of your age trying to obtain sexual favours or humiliate a child is a serious offence and requires elements of punishment.”
He noted Burns was a first offender and was deemed to have learning difficulties and said: “Whilst a custodial sentence is always a possibility for cases such as this it’s better that you be educated and managed in the community than locked away.”
Burns admitted sending messages of a sexual nature to a person he believed to be a 12-year-old girl and attempting to communicate indecently with a young child between June 1 and 29 last year at his former home in Glamis Road, Kirkcaldy.
Using the name James51, Burns responded to the fake Katy profile and sent a series of lewd messages.
