Nanticoke is a city in Luzerne County, in Northeastern Pennsylvania and has a population of approximately 10,700residents, making it the third largest city in Luzerne County. The region has well-documented history of sex trafficking and prostitution activity. The county contained towns that were stops on a domestic sex trafficking circuit in the 1970s and 1980s. The “pimp circuit,” as it was then called, ran along highway corridors in central Pennsylvania (e.g., Allentown, Reading, Harrisburg, Scranton, Wilkes Barre) and upstate New York (Schenectady, Albany, Buffalo). Like in most areas, there is also a long history of local street prostitution, and commercial sex advertised online and occurring anywhere within Luzerne County. In October 2013, a suspect a local prostitution ring was captured by Nanticoke police, assisted by Newport Township police. The man was arrested at a home on Espy St., Nanticoke. Investigators believed that the man and three accomplices posted topless photos of two teens on a website advertisement for escorts. Two of the men were alleged to have coerced a 16-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman into prostitution. The 16-year-old girl told police she and another 16-year-old girl were driven to a motel room where a man paid them $300 to sexually abuse the teenage girls for 30 minutes. While inside the room, the girls took off their clothes and sat on a bed, stalling for time as the man performed a lewd act. The arrested man was was charged with three counts of promoting prostitution of a minor, and one count each of unlawful contact with a minor, corruption of minors, criminal conspiracy and criminal use of a communication facility.

Consumer level demand provides the revenue stream for all prostitution and sex trafficking, and has therefore been targeted by local law enforcement agencies as a strategy for prevention and response. For example, in October 2022, a local man who had been arrested in Nanticoke and accused of sending nude pictures of himself and soliciting sex from a girl was sentenced in Luzerne County Court to one year and nine months, to three years and six months in state prison, followed by three years probation on charges of criminal solicitation to commit statutory sexual assault, corruption of minors and possessing “child pornography” (the term for child sexual abuse materials, or CSAM, often used in state law). He had pled guilty to the charges the prior June. Newport Township police and Luzerne County detectives arrested him in January 2022, after an investigation revealed he had been having inappropriate contact with a minor female. The offender was aware he was twice the girl’s age and sent her multiple explicit images of himself and offered the girl cash and gifts in exchange for nude photos and sex acts from her. He was arrested on allegations he downloaded and shared CSAM on a social media site. He had allegedly received the images from an unknown person and shared the images to others on Facebook Messenger. The man had been arraigned in District Court in Nanticoke on 11 counts of dissemination of children engaged in sex acts and two counts of criminal use of communication facility. He was jailed at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility for lack of $250,000 bail. According to the criminal complaint, the Luzerne County detectives and West Hazleton police, members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and state police Northeast Computer Crime Unit, executed a search warrant at the man’s residence. The search warrant was the result of Cybertips they received about suspected CSAM traced to the man’s residence in Nanticoke.