Gregory Coupland: Former Sydney schoolteacher tried to remotely delete child abuse material

After his phone was seized by police, a former Sydney schoolteacher attempted to remotely delete his stash of child abuse material. However it was too little, too late.

Gregory Coupland previously pictured leaving Downing Centre Local Court in September.

A decade after former primary school teacher Gregory Coupland was convicted for possessing child abuse material, a police officer was combing through his mobile phone which contained the same illegal content.

About the same time, the Forestville man was attempting to remotely delete parts of the online stash of child abuse material.

Coupland, 52, was committed for sentence at Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday after pleading guilty to two counts of possess child abuse data – use carriage service.

Agreed facts reveal the former teacher was convicted of possessing child abuse material, accessing child pornography, and using a carriage service to make available child pornography in 2012.

As part of child protection obligations, police visited his Forestville home on October 9 2022 and after inspecting his Samsung phone, police found child abuse material “downloaded from the internet”.

Gregory Coupland has been committed for sentence in the district court.

Officers obtained access to three cloud storage applications – ‘OneDrive’, ‘TeraBox’ and ‘IDrive’ – installed on Coupland’s phone where further child abuse material was found.

Between at least October 9 and October 20, the former teacher controlled the child abuse material held on these cloud storage accounts, agreed facts state.

Coupland’s phone was forensically examined with police finding 189 images and videos depicting children, mostly pubescent boys, which constituted child abuse material.

Almost 4000 images and videos were found which was not classified as child abuse material, but indicated a sexual interest in children.

The examination of Coupland’s phone found he had installed and accessed the cloud storage applications “which he could also control using other devices” and each were linked to an email address he had nominated to police. All were found to contain child abuse material.

In executing a commonwealth search warrant on October 20 2022, authorising officers to access the accounts “observed the material sync and delete from each online storage account”, which meant they were unable to review all the data contained.

Documents state in the week before officers accessed the accounts, 1.92GB of data saved to Coupland’s OneDrive account had been remotely deleted by him.

Over the same period, “remote deletion (or attempted deletion)” took place on the IDrive, containing 3287 image and video files, and TeraBox with 3902 image and video files.

Agreed facts reveal it was unknown how many files amounted to child abuse material.

During the syncing and deletion process on OneDrive, police identified image and video files constituting child abuse material, which were yet to be deleted and took screenshots.

Coupland was arrested and taken to Manly police station on October 21 2022.

The matter is listed for mention at Downing District Court on November 10.