A paedophile caught with nearly 25,000 sickening child abuse images tried to hide his phone from police during a second raid on his Dundee home.
Richard Ingram spent years sharing illicit images with other paedophiles online and had a stash of videos which would have taken over ten days to watch.
He was found with material showing children of all ages – from newborn babies to 15-year-olds – being abused in a mountain of horrifying material.
Thousands of videos and still images had been collected on a number of devices by Ingram over a period of more than six years.
More than 3,000 videos
Dundee Sheriff Court was told that 24,576 indecent images and videos were found during a raid on the home he shared with his girlfriend in the city on April 20, 2020.
Ingram, 38, from Dundee, admitted having indecent images of children in the city and in Arbroath between November 18, 2013 and April 2020.
He also admitted that, on various occasions between 20 June 2015 and 10 February 2020, he distributed indecent images of children to others.
The court was told that the material showed mainly young girls, with some of them only a month or two old, being abused.
Ingram had nearly 200 websites bookmarked on his computer devices which were directly linked to the distribution of child sex abuse images.
That police raid discovered over 3,000 videos in his collection, with a total running time of ten days and four hours.
Second raid after tip-off
Officers received confidential information the following year that indicated that Ingram was still downloading child porn so they raided his home again.
This time he asked his girlfriend Claire Houston to go to the door because he realised it was the police. Ingram disappeared into the bathroom.
When Ms Houston told officers about his reaction to their arrival, they conducted a search of the bathroom area and found a mobile phone hidden on the window ledge outside the property.
It was analysed and found to contain another haul of explicit material. He admitted having indecent images between 23 and 26 May last year.
He also admitted trying to pervert the course of justice by hiding a mobile phone on a window ledge at the property on Kingsway East, Dundee.
Sentence on Ingram was deferred for the preparation of background reports and he was remanded in custody by Sheriff Paul Brown.
