A sex offender who tried to lure girls and boys as young as 12 year old from the Philippines with the promise of money has narrowly avoided going to jail.
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The judge said the case of Wodonga man Thomas Kinchela, 55, was unusual because although he pleaded guilty to child pornography charges laid by Australian Federal Police, they were mostly in the form of Skype text conversations with pornographic comments rather than photographs.
Kinchela had 11 sexually explicit conversations with people in the Philippines in 2015, asking anyone older if they knew younger children who could join them.
He pleaded guilty to seven charges including transmitting and soliciting child pornography, engaging a child under 16 for a sexual act, transmitting incident communication to a child, possessing child abuse material and failing to report Skype user names as someone on the sex offender register.
In handing down his sentence in the County Court this week, Judge Damian Murphy noted Kinchela had victims aged between 11 and 17 years old, sometimes offering them relationships with promise of money and other times requesting sexual activity or "sexy photos".
On one occasion he sent back a sexually explicit photograph of himself.
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"Here unusually the child exploitation material involves text communication in Skype conversations without the camera operating," Judge Murphy said.
"The defence has admitted there was nothing sophisticated in the planning."
Kinchela did not use encrypted software, nor did he did not delete the chat history.
"The harm is potentially wider than the 11 users, it may extend to the younger children who are proposing to get involved," Judge Murphy said.
"This involved messages with children in a poor, third-world country and these laws are designed to protect those children."
But he said Kinchela's child pornography offending was at the lower end of the scale because there were limited photographs sent,
"Actual images are potent documents with a direct victim and give rise to the continued risk that they could be circulated through the internet world," he said.
The judge took into account that Kinchela was an Aboriginal man who had been taken from his culture as a child and turned to alcohol to deal with his problems.
Kinchela was already a registered sex offender after a prior offence of possessing child pornography, but did not complete the optional sex offender program offered back then and has never been treated for alcohol use.
He was sentenced to 15 months jail, but released on his own recognisance on a two-year good behaviour bond and placed on a two-year community corrections with the conditions he complete a sex offender program and not use dating sites.