Former child porn ring manager filmed in Wellington fitting room

Daniel Jess Moore, now 42, has run afoul of the law again after he was caught spying on people in changing rooms and filming one woman. Photo / File

The former gatekeeper of an international child porn ring has admitted spying on people in Wellington changing rooms and filming an unsuspecting woman as she undressed.

Daniel Jess Moore, 42, was jailed in 2010 for four and half years on numerous counts of distributing and possessing objectionable material after the US Secret Service tracked him to New Zealand and a team of local experts busted him managing a huge collection of illicit files.

Moore was the security expert behind an online network allowing at least 100 members to trade in child sexual abuse images and videos.

The day he was arrested he was found with a library containing 30,000 child abuse files.

Today Moore pleaded guilty to further offending relating to intimate videos - this time of a woman who had no idea she was being filmed as she tried on clothes in a central Wellington store.

Moore, who is in custody, appeared by audio visual link in the Wellington District Court this morning, where he pleaded guilty through his lawyer to two charges of behaving offensively, one of making an intimate visual recording, one of possessing cannabis and one of breaching his prison release conditions.

The release conditions were that he not possess a camera or anything capable of capturing and sending images.

Moore's release conditions were imposed in August 2018, when he was most recently punished for similar offending.

According to a summary of facts for the recent offending, Moore was spotted at a Cuba St clothing store on May 29 looking over the fitting room walls into the stalls next to him.

"He peered over the walls a number of times in a period of 15 minutes," the summary said.

"The defendant then crouched down and looked under the partition into the neighbouring stall, and only stopped when the victim knocked on his changing room stall."

At that point, he stood up "very quickly" and left without saying anything.

The victim was particularly concerned because there were children shopping in the store and using the changing rooms.

Moore was at it again on June 3 at another shop in Manners St.

He was seen by two victims repeatedly peering over the walls every few seconds, and only stopped when police arrived and knocked on the door of his fitting room stall.

A video Moore is believed to have been taking at the time appears to end as police knocked on the stall door - the knock can be heard in the video.

He was arrested and a search of the stall revealed the cannabis and a cell phone.

The video showed Moore's face as he placed the phone on the ground so the camera could point into the neighbouring fitting room, where an unknown woman was undressing.

While Moore entered guilty pleas today, his lawyer asked that no conviction be entered yet.

He will be sentenced in August.

In October 2007, an international operation identified the criminal network Moore was helping to run.

He was one of two managers of the network. The other manager was based in the US and was jailed for 18 years.

Authorities raided Moore's Kilbirnie Flat in 2008 while agents kept him distracted in online chat rooms.

Police and members of the Armed Offenders Squad stopped him disconnecting his computer, which would have made the data irrecoverable.