A north-east man who set up fake social media profiles to groom a young girl has been jailed.
Donald Sutherland created false Facebook accounts in the names of Alex Buchan and Sinead Brook before bombarding the 13-year-old with explicit images.
Sutherland then asked the schoolgirl, who can not be named for legal reasons, to respond to him by sending him private images of herself.
The 27-year-old eventually received the sexually explicit pictures from the child after he managed to “persuade her”.
Yesterday Sutherland appeared at Aberdeen Sheriff Court to be sentenced having previously admitted committing the offences between November 14 and 21 last year.
The court heard the pair had engaged in an extremely graphic sexual conversation late into one night.
The girl finally reluctantly sent Sutherland a picture of herself and another she had copied off the internet.
The court heard she had initially tried to ignore the messages he had been sending her, however after eventually responding to them she felt “persuaded and compelled to continue communicating with Alex Buchan and Sinead Brook”.
It was only when the girl’s unsuspecting mother came across one of the messages that she phoned the police and Sutherland, of Prunier Drive, Peterhead, was uncovered.
The court heard officers quickly discovered that the two accounts were both registered to the same e-mail address, and consequently tracked him down.
The girl’s mother said that she was “extremely upset” to find out that Sutherland was neither of the people he had claimed to be.
Yesterday, Sheriff Graham Buchanan jailed him for 13 months for committing two offences which broke the Sexual Offences Scotland Act 2003.
He was also placed on the sex offenders’ register for causing an underage girl to send sexually explicit messages to him and for exchanging sexually explicit written messages with her.