Canton Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Transfer of Obscene Material to a Minor

PORTLAND, Maine: A Canton man pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Portland today to attempting to transfer obscene material to a minor.

According to court records, in September 2019, Dale Carr, 51, began chatting online with an undercover FBI agent posing as a 13-year-old girl. Over the course of the next several weeks, Carr repeatedly asked the agent, who he believed was an underage girl, for sexually explicit photos and videos and expressed an interest in having sex with them. In October 2019, he sent the agent a close-up photograph of his penis.

Carr faces a maximum of 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years of supervised release. He will be sentenced after the completion of a presentence investigation report by the U.S. Probation Office. A federal district judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

The FBI investigated the case.

Online enticement is increasing: The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) reported an alarming 97.5% increase in online enticement reports between 2019 and 2020. “Online enticement” involves an individual communicating with someone believed to be a child via the internet with the intent to commit a sexual offense or abduction. This type of victimization takes place across every platform, including social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, etc. Learn more about online enticement, including red flags and risk factors, at www.missingkids.org/theissues/onlineenticement.

Project Safe Childhood: This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, visit www.justice.gov/psc.

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