A telephone stalker obsessed with underwear made a big mistake when a gym opened across the street from the apartment that he shared with his mother.

Paul Kavanagh was caught on film by detectives as he leaned over his London apartment balcony while making calls to the gym’s female receptionists.

This month Kavanagh was sentenced to two and a half years jail. He admitted to making 15,000 or so harassing calls to women asking them questions about their underwear. He’d call posing as a clothing researcher and claim to be gathering marketing data for a retailer.

Kavanagh had been making these calls for 12 years before he was caught. He’d usually start off his conversations with questions about the womens socks and sweaters, but then he would move on to their underwear and make lewd suggestions to his victims.

Judge Peter Testar concluded that Kavanagh had been “making these calls for the purposes of sexual gratification and, I must say to my mind, for the purposes of cruelty.”

The calls were all placed using unregistered pay as you go phones. When Kavanagh was finally caught he was, as stated above, targeting the female staff at the gym by commenting on their clothes and the way they wore their hair.