A 55-year-old man has been sentenced to 27 years in prison in Northern Ireland for a catalogue of child sex offences.
David Andrews, with an address at Maghaberry Prison, pleaded guilty to 130 charges of abuse relating to 47 victims, 46 of which are children.
Many of his victims were teenagers but some were younger, with one child aged just eight years old.
Many were based in England but others came from other countries.
He entrapped his victims by posing as a teenage boy on social media sites.
Andrews groomed them, secured intimate images from them and then used the images to blackmail them for more.
It is a practice known as catfishing or sextortion.
On at least one occasion he sent images he received to friends of the girl he had targeted.
They were circulated in her school.
She dropped out and failed her exams.
In a victim impact report, this victim said she had been laughed at in school and had felt "physically sick" when she realised the truth.
Andrews was sentenced at Downpatrick Crown Court.
His victim who was an adult, was a young woman with a severe learning disability.
The offences included dressing her in women's underwear and placing her in sexualised poses and sexually assaulting her.
He took photographs of her and distributed them to others in an attempt to secure other images from them.
Judge Geoffrey Miller said the harm done to this woman must be considered as "extremely high" and displayed a level of "depravity that is difficult to comprehend and utterly sickening".
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The offences took place between 1 January 2019 and 28 March 2020.
Andrews pleaded guilty to ten counts of sexual communication with a child, 19 charges of possessing indecent images, 11 counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity as well as a suite of other offences including blackmail and making threats to kill.
He will serve a minimum of 13.5 years initially with the balance of his term of imprisonment decided by a parole board.
