A CONVICTED sex offender from Wigton with an "addiction" to pornography was caught flouting a court order after he asked the police to check his phone.

Former St Bees man Trevor Wilkinson, 62, breached a sexual harm prevention order by failing to tell police about a YouTube account he set up and by using a “cloud storage” facility while accessing the internet.

Police discovered the offences after the defendant went to them to complain that his phone was working "too slowly."

The defendant was given a sexual harm prevention order in 2013 for a catalogue of horrific sexual offending, including multiple rapes, voyeurism, and possessing almost 1,000 child abuse images.

Read more: Man admits sex offences and three rapes

When police found the YouTube account and the cloud storage facility, Wilkinson was heard to comment: “This is a bad oversight on my part,” a prosecutor told  Carlisle Crown Court. 

There was no suggestion that Wilkinson, of Brindlefield, Wigton, attempted to view indecent child images, though police did find that he used search terms suggesting his interest in extreme pornography.

The court heard that the defendant had told probation staff that he had an “addiction” to pornography. Judge Nicholas Barker suggested the defendant’s phone may have been sluggish because he was spending his time looking at pornography.

Judge Barker told the defendant: “In 2013, you received a very significant sentence for very serious offending. You went to prison for a long time.”

The judge noted the two order breaches before the court demonstrated just how careful and how rigorous Wilkinson had to be to observe the conditions of his sexual harm prevention order.

It was designed to curtail and regulate the defendant’s internet access.   

The judge accepted that Wilkinson’s two offences, which are accepted to be “low level breaches” of his order, were not in any way suggestive of a repetition of his original offending showing sexual interest in children.

The judge imposed a two-year community order with 150 hours of unpaid work and 10 rehabilitation activity days.