A foot fetish voyeur has been reprimanded after being caught with more than 10,000 illicit images of schoolgirls’ feet.
Samuel Tobin, 31, had thousands of pictures and 400 videos on his phone.
Many of them were of underage girls, with a USB stick containing even more images categorised into folders named ‘flats’, ‘loafers’, ‘flip-flops’, ‘sandals’, and ‘schoolgirls’.
Another 28 USB sticks, suspected of containing more images, are ‘awaiting further assessment’.
Prosecutor Hollie Davies told Basildon Crown Court that Tobin appeared to have staked out a school
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Judge Peter Clark said the images, while not indecent, appeared to have all been taken for sexual gratification and without the subjects’ knowledge.
He warned Tobin that he is in ‘the last chance saloon’ after the ‘alarming’ offenses but opted not to sentence him to jail time.
Sitting in the dock with his head in his hands, Tobin listened as he was handed a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work, complete a ‘building better choices’ course, and attend up to 30 additional rehabilitation activity days with probation.
The judge concluded that there is a ‘realistic prospect of rehabilitation’, despite Tobin’s ‘terrible history’, which meant he had already started attending therapy to manage his urges.
Still, a 10-year sexual harm prevention order has been imposed, meaning he will be on the sex offenders register for that period.
Tobin was told by the judge: ‘It’s in your hands now to make sure you don’t tip over the edge.’
This was not Tobin’s first offense, as he was first slapped with a sexual risk order in 2021, ‘to help manage the defendant’s sexual preoccupation with feet and shoes’, said Miss Davies.
The court order specifically banned him from taking images of people’s feet without their consent; however, the urge became overwhelming, and he consequently breached the order in 2023, 2025, and again in 2026.
When Essex Police carried out a random spot check at Tobin’s Westcliff, Essex, home in June, they found him using the computer.
He ‘grabbed hold of his phone and is said to have begun fussing with it, pressing buttons, before the officer took the phone from him’, said the prosecutor.
The officer found the photo gallery empty, but the deleted folder had approximately 10,000 images and 444 videos, the ‘majority’ of which were of female feet, either ‘in sandals or school-type pumps and taken from varied angles’.
Among all the images, just one amounted to voyeurism – an image Tobin had taken of a woman sunbathing in the privacy of her back garden – as a voyeurism charge requires the victim to be ‘doing a private act’.
The thousands of other images were all charged as a breach of his sexual risk order, with community orders given as a punishment.
He was still subject to the most recent community order when his most recent offenses were carried out.
Defending, Angelina Nurse said Tobin was diagnosed with autism and awaiting a possible diagnosis for ADHD. She said the diagnosis, in her opinion, can be ‘seen in his offending’.
‘There is, he will accept, an obsession, a compulsion, with taking photographs of feet, ankles and shoes.’
While there was ‘no doubt that the offending has crossed the custody threshold’, the lawyer said, the probation service felt Tobin’s risk could be managed in the community.
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