Nathaniel Lamar Nelson Scott, a 36-year-old resident of Bowie, Maryland, has been sentenced to 96 months in federal prison for traveling to the District of Columbia with the intent to engage in sexual acts with a child. The sentencing took place today in U.S. District Court.
The announcement was made by U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr., FBI Special Agent in Charge Sean Ryan of the Washington Field Office Criminal and Cyber Division, and Chief Pamela Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department.
Scott entered a guilty plea on October 16, 2024, for one count of travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct. In addition to his prison sentence, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich ordered Scott to serve a lifetime term of supervised release and mandated that he register as a sex offender.
Evidence presented by the government revealed that Scott began communicating through an encrypted messaging application in May 2024 with an individual he met on a fetish website. Believing this person was a pedophile abusing his six-year-old daughter, Scott engaged in explicit conversations about sexually abusing the child. However, the person was actually an undercover officer from the MPD–FBI Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force. On June 5, 2024, Scott traveled from Maryland to meet at a pre-arranged location in D.C., where he was arrested.
This case is part of Project Safe Childhood, an initiative launched by the Department of Justice in May 2006 aimed at combating child sexual exploitation and abuse nationwide. This project brings together resources from federal, state, and local levels to locate and prosecute individuals exploiting children via the internet while also identifying and rescuing victims.
The investigation was conducted by the FBI Washington Field Office alongside MPD’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force. This task force includes FBI agents as well as other federal agents and detectives from northern Virginia and D.C., focusing on investigating individuals involved in child exploitation and human trafficking.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jocelyn Bond and Paul V. Courtney are prosecuting this case.
