Sex offender pleads guilty to voyeurism, luring

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/06/2017 (3076 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 35-year-old sex offender faces prison time after he admitted to posing as a teenage boy on an instant-messaging app to get underage girls to send him nude photos.

David Thomas Pearson of Winnipeg awaits sentencing on several child-pornography and luring charges after he admitted to communicating with six underage victims while he was out on bail for other child-porn offences. He entered his guilty pleas Friday to one count of voyeurism and six counts of luring over the Internet.

After he had pleaded guilty to luring a 15-year-old girl he met online, he was caught taking close-up photos of girls in bikinis at Nutimik Lake beach in August 2015.

Police seized his laptop, smartphone and iPad — none of which he was allowed to have under a court order that prohibited him from using any device to access the Internet.

Investigators analyzed the devices and found Pearson had been using an instant messaging app to communicate with six underage girls in the U.S. from 2013 to 2015.

Posing as a teen boy named Ethan, he convinced four of the victims to send nude photos over the Kik Messenger app and had some explicit conversations with them. RCMP travelled to the U.S. to interview the victims, all of whom were under 18 and one of whom was under 16.

Pearson was arrested in 2011 when he was crossing the border into Canada at Emerson and was selected for a random search of his belongings, which revealed a nude image of an underage girl.

A lengthy police investigation found Pearson had been communicating with a 15-year-old girl from Las Vegas and was passing himself off as a 16-year-old boy.

He pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation in March 2015 and was sentenced to two years in jail.

“It was almost like a video game, taking on another persona,” he said during his sentencing hearing in April 2016.

— Katie May