A TROON creep who left a former partner petrified after using her intimate pictures to pretend to be her on sex websites wailed like a baby as he was jailed over the “gross breach of trust.”

Andrew Dickson, who was also found with indecent images of children, collapsed in tears at the news he was being caged for 40 months.

He dropped to his knees in the dock as the clerk confirmed the length of his sentence - and that he was being placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life.

Dickson had used up-to-date pictures he’d stolen from his ex-partner’s social media profiles and intimate pictures he’d been sent by the woman while they were together, in a bid to keep their long-distance relationship alive.

He stockpiled her pictures, keeping them in a computer folder without her knowing, and, years after they split, uploaded them to a host of dating websites.

The profiles he created were accompanied with smutty biographies, describing her as a masochistic nymphomaniac.

Dickson, who grew up in Troon but later moved to Newton Mearns, created the fake profiles and had online sexual conversations with men who believed he really was the woman, from the comfort of his bedroom in his mother’s home in the affluent Glasgow suburb.

But he left a digital footprint which led police straight to his mother’s door after one potential suitor tracked down his real ex on Facebook.

And when officers raided his mum’s five-bedroom home they found horrendous images of children being sexually abused stashed on his computers.

Dickson, 33, admitted his guilt previously and returned to the dock at Paisley Sheriff Court last week to be sentenced.

And Sheriff Pender slammed him for his actions as he ruled the only appropriate sentence was prison.

In a short but hard-hitting sentencing statement, he said: “I suppose I could say that ‘revenge porn’ is a fairly new offence.

“The advancement of new types of social media is the main reason these types of crimes can be committed.

“These images were sent to you while you were in a relationship with this woman and in a position of trust.

“You went on to expose them at the end of that relationship which is a gross breach of that trust and makes this type of crime, to me, much more serious and takes it to a much higher level.

“You put these images on publicwebsites that appear to have been created by you.

“I can only deal with this offence by a substantial period of imprisonment.”

The court heard previously that Dickson had been in a sexual relationship with the woman for 19 months.

His crimes came to light when she was contacted on Facebook by a man who had seen one of the profiles Dickson created on a website - and went to investigate herself.

She was horrified when she found profiles of herself on x-rated websites.

Dickson had written degrading comments in the biography sections of the profiles, saying she was “a girl who likes to be used and abused” adding: “Please get in touch if you want to threat me like a total slut.

“I’m in to some dark stuff - I’m a cheap, white piece of f*** meat.”

Shocked and disgusted by what she’d found, the woman contacted the police and an investigation was launched.

During the probe, it emerged the fake accounts had been used 10 to 20 times a day and that IP addresses linked to the profiles related to a Sky account in the name of Jennifer Dickson - Andrew’s mother.

When police went to his mother’s home to raid the property, both he and she were there, and officers seized five mobile phones and three laptops.

When they searched the devices, they found 659 indecent images of girls aged between eight and 16 being sexually abused, that Dickson had downloaded.

He had also used the phones and other online messaging programs to have sexual conversations with some men while pretending to be the woman after meeting them through the bogus profiles he’d set up.

The content of the messages was so graphic Sheriff David Pender said they did not have to be read out in court.

As well as admitting a charge of downloading child abuse images, between January and February 2011, Dickson admitted a breach ofthe peace charge.

That charge stated he “did upload indecent photographs of your ex-partner onto numerous pornographic websites, write a profile description on said websites which disclosed her location, contained lewd and sexual remarks regarding her sexual preferences and invited users of said pornographic websites to contact her for their sexual gratification and pretend to be her when communicating with said users to the alarm of her, between October 2015 and April 2017.