SINGAPORE: During a police raid, a man was found with 79 sexually explicit videos involving 87 identifiable children, including a little boy, who appeared to be around two years old.
On May 18, Emerson Poh Jun Wei, 31, was sentenced to a year and nine months’ jail and two strokes of the cane.
He had pleaded guilty to one count of being in possession of such material. At the time of the offence, he was an operations assistant at an undisclosed local company.
Court documents did not disclose how his offence came to light, but the police raided his home on Sept 7, 2023.
The authorities then uncovered the 79 videos on his laptop, desktop computer and mobile phone.
Poh was arrested that day, and was charged in court in 2025.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Zhou Yang told the court that Poh started watching pornographic videos in 2013.
Court documents stated that he had a preference for those involving boys around 15 to 16 years old.
He initially streamed pornographic videos on websites that he found using a search engine.
Poh also downloaded adult pornographic videos from Telegram group chats and from download links posted on Twitter, the court heard.
Around 2018 to 2019, he came across Tumbler, a microblogging and social media platform.
He then began downloading child abuse material through the platform, particularly pornographic videos and photographs showing boys around 12 to 16 years old.
When Tumblr began removing the pornographic materials hosted on its website, Poh decided to download all the child abuse material that he could find.
“Progressively, the accused came to prefer child abuse material involving young boys around 12 years old, and he became addicted to watching such videos,” the DPP said.
Poh initially stored the child abuse material on his Google Drive, his laptop and his desktop computer.
Around 2023, his Google Drive was suspended as it was found to contain such material.
For easy access to them, he transferred some of the videos from his desktop computer to a folder in the gallery of his mobile phone.
Poh’s bail has been set at S$25,000 (US$19,539), and he will start his sentence on June 15. - The Straits Times/ANN
