A Bedford man who drove to the KFC car park at Kempston thinking he was meeting an 11-year-old girl for sex was jailed for for four-and-a-half years on Tuesday, September 14, 2021.
Ryan Massey arrived outside the takeaway in May of this year to find a group of paedophile hunters waiting for him and, after being confronted by them, the police were called and he was arrested.
The 28-year-old had been communicating online with four young girls at the time, who in fact turned out to be ‘decoys’.
They didn’t actually exist and their fake details had been posted on Facebook by four groups of online paedophile hunters. But Massey wasn’t to know that.
After making contact with the girls, who were aged between 11 and 15, he would quickly turn the online chats to sex, sending them pictures of male and female genitalia and encouraging them to send him intimate photos of themselves.
What Massey didn’t realise was the ‘girls’ he knew as ‘Sammi’, ‘Rosie’, ‘Sky’ and ‘Lilly’ were in fact adult members of paedophilic hunter groups pretending to be children in order to catch perverts looking online for youngsters to groom and have sex with.
Massey, of Edward Road in Bedford, had gone to the car park on May 26 this year thinking he was meeting the 11-year-old girl, who he knew as ‘Sammi’.
In a message he had sent to Sammi the day before, he had said: “When I see you we can have sex for the first time.”
After his arrest the police discovered he had been sending similar messages to the three other girls. He pleaded guilty to a charge of arranging or facilitating the commission of a child sex offence concerning the decoy Sammi.
Massey further pleaded guilty to attempting to cause or incite a child under 13 to engage in penetrative sexual activity involving the same girl and attempted sexual communication with her.
He also admitted six other charges concerning his online contact with the three other girls in May of this year who were also decoys.
He admitted three further charges of attempting to incite or cause a child to engage in penetrative sexual activity and three charges of attempted sexual communication with a child. The court heard he had encouraged the girls to masturbate in messages he sent them.
Sentencing Massey, Judge Tayton told him that on making contact with the girl he had “immediately engaged in sexualised conversations with them.”
She went on: “You invited them to engage in penetrative sexual activity and you sent photos of your private parts and invited them to send you photos of their private parts.”
The judge said Massey had then progressed to asking to meet the girls for sex. Judge Tayton said she noted that when the ‘girls’ had complained about what he was asking them to do, he had ‘pressed’ them to continue.
As well as serving the four-and-a-half year jail sentence, Massey was told he would also be the subject of a sexual harm prevention order for an indefinite period, which would monitor and supervise his computer access and his activity online.
His name will also go on the sex offenders’ register and he was told he would be barred from ever taking up employment which involved working with children. The judge also ordered the forfeiture and destruction of a mobile phone found on Massey when he was arrested.
