AN HGV driver who tried to chat up a 12-year-old girl on Snapchat was caught because he had added a set of devil’s horns to his profile picture.

Jamie Czyz was trapped by a police sting operation because the "child" who he asked to send him upskirt pictures from her school desk was in fact an undercover police officer.

He sent pictures of his own genitals from the cab of his lorry and was identified by police because he used the same image on his anonymous Snapchat account as he did on other social media where he used his own name.

The police were able to prove it was Czyz because he had added devil’s horns to both images.

Czyz, aged 36, of Nadder Meadow, South Molton, admitted attempted sexual communication with a child and was jailed for six months, suspended for a year-and-a-half and sent on a 31-session sex offenders’ treatment programme with 15 days of rehabilitation activities by Judge David Evans at Exeter Crown Court.

He told him: “Despite being told the girl was 12, you immediately turned the communications to sexual matters and asked for intimate images.”

Mr Nigel Hall, prosecuting, said Czyz contacted a decoy profile set up by the Yorkshire and Humberside Organised Crime Unit on March 20 last year and believed he was talking to a 12-year-old girl named Ruby.

When she told him she could not send him images because she was in school, he asked her to use her phone to take an upskirt image while she was sat at her desk. He was identified through an IP address and from his profile image which had been doctored to add devil’s horns.

Mr Robert Jacobs, defending, said Czyz had only conducted the conversation for a day and then stopped because he realised it was wrong. He has sought help from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation charity to ensure he does not repeat his behaviour.

Crown Court Reporter