A Vancouver man has been found guilty of luring an underage girl through Facebook, despite his protestations that he thought he was talking to a middle-aged man.

Raymond Kelly McCall was a 40-year-old married father of one when he became the target of an undercover online investigation by Vancouver police in April 2009.

Over the course of a little more than a month, an officer with the force's vice unit befriended McCall over Facebook, introducing himself as a 14-year-old girl named Julie. The relationship then moved onto MSN Messenger, where it rapidly escalated to explicit sex talk, including suggestions from McCall that Julie was old enough for sex and that she should expose herself via webcam.

"The ‘chats' were thrill-seeking and it was clear Mr. McCall wanted ‘Julie' to be receptive to his sexual advances through his grooming," Judge Gregory Rideout wrote in his Jan. 26 decision.

"Mr. McCall was actively grooming ‘Julie' for improper sexual purposes for his own sexual gratification when he knew or believed that she was under the age of 16."

McCall was arrested in June 2009 while he was chatting with Julie online at his office in downtown Vancouver, where he worked as a security manager for a large building.

During the course of his trial in Vancouver provincial court, McCall didn't deny that he was responsible for the lewd conversations, but argued that he had never believed Julie was a 14-year-old girl.

Instead, he said he thought he was talking with an adult man who was "playing a game" with him.

That suspicion dated back to online conversations with another teenage girl, who told McCall that she performed oral sex on an older man in a hotel room.

It was that older man McCall believed was "playing" with him online.

"I had decided very early on that I would speak to this guy and I would play his game, and again, see where he was going with this, where he wanted to go with this, and what his end game was, why he initially contacted me and what his motives were, so I played along," McCall told the court.

He also argued that he continued the chats because he was bored at work.

But the judge ruled that those arguments were simply implausible, pointing out that McCall had sent Julie a photograph of himself and had provided her with his real age and information about where he worked.

"If, as Mr. McCall contended, he was concerned that this person could possibly threaten him or even extort money from him, why would he pass along personal information respecting himself which would further identify himself to this person?" Rideout asked.

"Why would he not simply call that person's game, express his suspicions and tell that person to leave him alone?"

McCall is now awaiting sentencing. The maximum jail term for a child-luring conviction is 10 years.