A 34-YEAR-OLD Stonehouse man who groomed young girls, some of which were care leavers, had behavioural issues, or were self harming, has been jailed for 16 years.

Jason Evans, of Gloucester Road, Stonehouse, was given an extended jail sentence for various offences of inciting girls to engage in sexual activity, possession of vile images of child abuse, and breaching sexual harm prevention orders on Thursday.

He admitted 24 offences and asked for a further 12 to be taken into consideration.

Judge Ian Lawrie QC heard at Gloucester crown court that Evans used multiple online personas to communicate with girls on the MyLOL site, both male and female, to incite the girls into sexual activity, Mr Haggerty said.

He was known as both ‘Jason’ and ‘Jessica’ and kept files named after the underage girls he was communicating with.

Evans would use the ‘Jessica’ profile to reassure and encourage the girls about their communication with ‘Jason’, getting themn to send him naked intimate images and to make arrangements to meet him.

Many of them were vulnerable, prosecutor Alistair Haggerty told the judge - one was aged 15 but had a ‘mental age of 9’.

Evans was arrested at Stonehouse Railway Station on July 18 last year, after he had gone there ‘presumably in anticipation of meeting a child’ he had been grooming online.

Little did Evans know that he had been communicating with three undercover police officers purporting to be teenage girls on the MyLOL teen dating app.

Following his arrest and a search of his property, officers seized computer devices and some were hidden in a void above a suspended ceiling.

The possession of this equipment placed him in breach of a sexual harm prevention order imposed for previous offending, the prosecutor said.

When the devices were analysed, the police found 2,638 indecent images of children with 70 classified as category A, the most serious.

Mr Haggerty said some of the vile images were ‘extremely graphic’ with two hours of category A videos found.