Fredericksburg is a suburb of Washington, DC with 28,000 residents, located in northern Virginia. Prostitution and child sex trafficking have posed considerable problems in the city for over two decades, with activities frequently concentrated in and around Fredericksburg truck stops along Interstate 95. In one particularly high-profile case, federal prosecutors investigated a “prolific sex trafficker” who had exploited more than 55 women and girls as part of one of the largest such ventures law enforcement ever discovered in Virginia.  The man used force, fraud, and coercion to compel servce in prostitution.  He also got them addicted to drugs so he could more easily control them, used sodomy as a form of punishment, took away the women’s cellphones and IDs so they could not escape, and, in one case, had someone deliver a Fentanyl patch on which a prostitute died from an overdose. The man was arrested during a web-based prostitution sting at a hotel in Fredericksburg in 2013, and, after a lengthy investigation, he was charged in 2015, and convicted and sentenced in 2016.

To address issues associated with prostitution and sex trafficking, the Fredericksburg Police Department has conducted street-level reverse stings since the mid-1980s to reduce underlying demand driving the local commercial sex market. Sometimes the names and other identifying information about the sex buyers arrested have been reported in local news outlets.