Nicholas Boers fronts court over sickening child abuse material

A Waranga Shores father who was part of a vile online network traded child sex images of children as young as four years old “out of curiosity”.

Nicholas Cornelius Boers was part of a vile online network that shared sickening child abuse material on social media platforms.

A Victorian agriculture worker who was part of a vile online network that shared child abuse material and told fellow pedophiles he had “no limits” has been jailed.

Nicholas Boers, 40, of Waranga Shores in the state’s north, appeared for sentencing in the County Court at Shepparton on Wednesday on charges relating to the possession and distribution of child abuse material over nearly four-and-a-half years.

Judge Peter Rozen sentenced him to two years and six months in prison and ordered that he be released after serving one year and three months to be of good behaviour for three years.

Boers pleaded guilty earlier this month to charges of using a carriage service to transmit, make available child abuse material and to cause such material to be transmitted to him between December 2018 and May 2023.

A father of three children under the age of 13, Boers used encrypted messaging services such as Kik Messenger and Tumblr to publish and distribute the material to other users.

Nicholas Boers told a fellow Kik Messenger user he had “no limits” when it came to child abuse material.

Boers also sent child abuse material via text messages and kept vile images in a mega.nz cloud storage account.

The Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team (JACET) executed a warrant at his home on May 5, 2023 and seized three Apple iphones that contained 284 child abuse material.

He told police he had been using Kik Messenger for six years, that he wasn’t sure how many child abuse material he had stored and that he sought them “out of curiosity”.

During a conversation with Kik Messenger user Family First in September 2019, Boers asked him what got him going. When Family First said he had no limits, Boers responded “same”.

Another Kik Messenger conversation saw Boers send 15 URL links to a fellow user which said “young” and “fifteen”.

Judge Rozen said Boers also published two stories on his Tumblr account in June and August 2019 in which he described a sexual interaction between a six-year-old child and an adult and an incest story between a 12-year-old girl and her father.

“You were viewing and sharing child abuse material on a regular basis with significant numbers of like-minded people. You were more than a passive viewer of the material.

“As a participant in the online network, you engaged in discussions with others about the kinds of child abuse material sought, and on occasion traded child abuse material and benefitted by receiving child abuse material in return.

“Your actions had the effect of commoditizing actual child victims that were quite clearly harmed in the creation of the material. Some victims were as young as four,” Judge Rozen said.