A vigilante paedeophile hunter has been jailed for falsely claiming a man groomed teenagers.
Stephen Dure, 34, from Southampton, claimed Paul Farhad was a violent psychopath and a massive danger to society in a Facebook post in November 2017.
Southampton Magistrates Court heard Mr Farhad, from Eastleigh, had lost his job over the accusation and a brick had been thrown through his window.
Mr Farhad also said paint had been sprayed on his door after 110,000 people saw Dures message which he said implied he was a paedophile, the BBC reports.
Dure, also known as Stevie Trap, pleaded guilty to making an improper communication online at a hearing on Friday.
He sentenced to 15 weeks behind bars and ordered to pay costs of around £750.
Dure explained in a BBC Inside Out programme in 2017 that he posed as children on the internet to trap sex offenders.
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He spends up to 40 hours a week speaking to predators online, to arrange a sting to hand them over to police.
Dure, who is a scaffolder by trade, has 200,000 followers on Facebook and often posts videos of himself confronting alleged paedophiles.
Mr Farhad told the court that the post in 2017 wrongly implied he was a paedophile and that his home had been attacked because of it.
Alfred Underwood, defending, said Mr Dure accepted that Mr Farhad was not a paedophile.
He added this was nowhere suggested in the Facebook message, which was read out in court.
According to the BBC, Mr Farhad then shared a screenshot of the post on his phone showing that the words grooming teenagers had been deleted from the original message.
After this Dure then changed his plea to guilty.
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