Accrington Paedophile Mark Stephen Steel ‘deliberately’ breached a court order by using prohibited mobile phone apps and computer software.
The Accrington man was given a sexual harm prevention order (SHPO) by Burnley Crown Court in November 2017 after downloading more than 2,200 indecent images of children.
They included 336 category A indecent photographs of children – the most serious category – along with making 165 category B and 1,717 category C photographs.
Mark Stephen Steel was also caught distributing indecent images of children, in possession of a prohibited photograph of a child and in possession of 141 extreme pornographic images.
Mark Stephen Steel pleaded guilty to three counts of breaching a SHPO.
The 59-year-old, Mark Stephen Steel, was arrested by police on October 1, 2018, after ‘deliberately breaching’ the terms of his SHPO.
Between June and October 2018 he used the Avira Phantom virtual private network application, the Antox peer to peer messaging and file sharing service and also failed to provide login credentials to a Mega cloud storage service.
Mark Stephen Steel, who has seven convictions for 18 offences, had only recently been released on licence from a prison sentence for the indecent images.
He pleaded guilty to three counts of breaching the SHPO and was sentenced to a three-year community order with a sex offender treatment programme and 150 hours unpaid work.
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