A sex offender was confronted outside the popular cafe where he worked after having online sex chats with what he thought was a 15-year-old boy.
In fact Stuart Chaves had been communicating with an adult man posing as a teenager and operating a social media "decoy" account.
Swansea Crown Court heard that the chats began in November 2018 on dating and social networking site Grindr.
Prosecuting counsel Craig Jones said that 46-year-old Chaves told the profile that at 15 he was too young to be on the site - but continued chatting with him.
Chaves told the boy that he was a chef and was 38-years-old, and though the conversation began "innocuously enough" matters soon turned sexual with references to kissing, licking, "nipple play", and the pair's respective sexual experience.
And at one point Chaves told the decoy "you are too young but I find you cute".
The court heard that the defendant asked the boy if he was interested in meeting - a date was set but Chaves then tried to pull out of the meeting, saying he was unwell.
However the decoy and a number of associates kept the appointment and confronted the defendant as he left work at a coffee shop in Carmarthen .
Chaves, of Cefn Ffynnon, Margam, Port Talbot , had previously pleaded guilty to attempted sexual communications with a child when he appeared in the dock for sentencing.
The court heard he has four previous convictions for five offences including sexual assault - which had seen him stroking and grabbing the bottom of an 18-year-old boy on Windsor Road in Neath - and outraging public decency, an incident involving Chaves and another man in the doorway of a Tesco store in Cardiff .
Paul Hobson, for Chaves, said none of the defendant's previous offending had involved children.
He said his client had been confronted outside his place of work by a "vigilante group", and that Chaves led a life "isolated from family".
The barrister said while there was "clearly an element of denial" in what Chaves had told probation officers, the probation service was of the view they could work with him.
Judge Geraint Walters told the defendant there had been a "fair degree of persistence" in the online actions of the decoy, and that "the conduct of the vigilante in this case got very close to inciting you to commit an offence - that is why investigations of this sort are best left to the professionals, namely the police."
He added: "The courts have, for some little time, expressed concerns about people obsessed with this sort of activity."
The judge said a better alternative than "modest" period of custody set out in the guidelines would be a sentence that allowed the probation service to work with the defendant to address the issues underlying his offending.
Chaves was made the subject of a two year community order with a rehabilitation course, and will be on the sex offenders register for the next five years. As the prosecution had not asked for a sexual harm prevention order to control the defendant's access to the internet, the judge said he would not make such an order.
