Simon Wilders Jailed for Viewing Category A Child Abuse Video

Convicted paedophile jailed for accessing indecent images of children

A convicted paedophile has been jailed after police discovered he had accessed indecent images of children on his mobile phone. Simon Wilders, 42, was visited at his home address by specialist officers who manage sexual offenders on December 1, 2024. Following two previous convictions for online offences involving children, Wilders was handed a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) in April 2021.

The SHPO stated he must not use any device capable of accessing the internet unless it had the capacity to retain and display the history of internet use. During the visit, Wilders confessed to officers that he had wiped his mobile phone, resetting it to factory settings, and therefore deleted his internet search history, breaching the SHPO. Police installed monitoring software on Wilders' mobile phone following this visit as he was perceived to be a high-risk offender.

A week later, the monitoring software notified officers that Wilder had viewed an indecent video of a child in the early hours of December 7, 2024. The video Wilder viewed was deemed to be category A, the most serious classification of child indecent images or videos. Further checks of Wilders' phone showed that he had been using two aliases in his online activity, further breaching his Sexual Offences Notification requirements by not registering these as alias names with police.

Wilders, of Victoria Road, Cambridge, was arrested on December 19, 2024. On April 11, at Huntingdon Law Courts, he was jailed for one year and seven months after pleading guilty to making an indecent photograph/pseudo-photograph of a child. He was also ordered to sign the Sex Offenders Register indefinitely and a new SHPO was made for ten years, to monitor any future offending.