Within months, the 35-year-old was viewing "depraved" child sexual abuse videos, featuring some victims who were less than a year old.
Gray appeared in the Dunedin District Court this week, where he was jailed for two years for possessing and supplying objectionable publications, as well as for four breaches of an extended supervision order.
Such orders are reserved for high-risk sexual or violent offenders and allow Corrections to monitor individuals and manage the threat they present.
In January 2018, Gray was made subject to a range of restrictions, which included barring him from contact with under-16s and from using internet-capable devices without permission.
In April that year, in breach of the order, the defendant logged into a social media account under the name "Ivcypher".
He selected a photo of a naked girl (aged 8-10) and, over the space of an hour, shared the file with other unknown users, the court heard.
A couple of months later he created an email address on a cloud storage service and accessed a cache of child pornography assembled by another online member.
In it were 508 videos and 178 images.
Gray accessed a folder entitled "baby", which held more than 50 files depicting the abuse of very young children.
Some of the victims involved were only months old.
Much of the video content is too explicit to be described but the clips featured adult males and females performing sexual acts on babies.
At the end of one, the baby girl involved can be heard saying "bye bye" to the camera.
The court summary noted that while one of the files was deleted in September 2018, Gray remained in possession of the others until his account was suspended in October 2019.
Crown prosecutor Marcail Brosnan said the nature of the content was "concerning" and stressed that those like the defendant fuelled the vile industry which produced such material.
Judge Kevin Phillips said Gray had received a range of sentences in the past and nothing had stopped him from reoffending.
He declined an application for name suppression and said there was high public interest in such cases.
"[The crimes] can only be described as depraved," he said.
The judge said Gray was not suitable for a community-based sentence.
It is understood that because of the time the man has already spent behind bars, he will be released later this year.
