Tonight at around 6pm we were in #Newcastle to confront Dan 21 from #Durham about his online activity with
what he believed to be a 13 year old girl, Dan travelled by car to pick up and take the child(decoy) back to hers for sex and sexual activity.
Police turned up quickly, and while searching his car found the condom he said he was bringing with him.
update 17/09/2018 :- released pending further investigation.
below are the first few messages.
Update 16/10/2018
Today Daniel John eldridge was sentanced at court.
Daniel John Eldridge, 21, spent four months chatting to who he believed was a teenage girl on WhatsApp.
But when he arrived, holding a Dairy Milk and a Coke, to meet the girl, he was confronted by undercover group Geordie Chasers.
The man travelled around 20 miles from his home in Meadowfield, County Durham, to Newcastle for the encounter.
Footage taken by the undercover group was passed on to the authorities. Eldridge pleaded guilty to attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child and arranging or facilitating the commission of a child under the sexual offences act 2003.
He was handed a 36-week jail sentence, suspended for 24 months, and given a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for seven years, which bans him from contacting children online, He was also ordered to pay costs of £225 and attend a 31 day sex offenders program.
Geordie Chasers said the sentence was ‘far too lenient’. During the 16-minute video, Eldridge struggles to speak as the group tell him he would have scarred the child for life. At one point Eldridge can be heard saying: ‘I’ve lost everything.’
He also said that his decision to meet the supposed 13-year-old was ‘daft’, to which one of the team replied: ‘I think you’re a little bit more than daft.’
The man holding the camera asks if Eldridge knew the age of consent, to which he replied ’18’.
But screenshots of the conversation show he knew the girl he thought he was contacting was only 13.
