GREENSBORO, N.C. – A Garner, N.C., man who traveled to Alamance County to have sex with what he believed to be a 13-year-old girl was sentenced to 30 years in prison today, announced Matthew G.T. Martin, United States Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina.
JOSEPH DANIEL ORAN, 34, pleaded guilty on May 7, 2020 for attempted enticement of a minor and possession of child [censored]ography. He was sentenced today by United States District Judge Catherine C. Eagles to 360 months of imprisonment followed by 20 years of supervised release. Judge Eagles sentenced ORAN to 360 months for attempted enticement of a minor, and 240 months for possession of child [censored]ography, with those sentences running concurrently.
At the time he committed the Alamance County offenses, ORAN was already a registered sex offender following his 2011 Wake County, N.C., conviction for solicitation of a child by computer and indecent liberties with a minor.
Beginning in September 2017, Oran began chatting online with an individual purporting to be a 13-year-old girl, but who was actually an undercover detective with the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office. ORAN exchanged more than two thousand text messages with the undercover detective over several weeks. ORAN repeatedly directed the conversation to topics of a sexual nature and expressed his desire to engage in sexual acts with the person he believed to be a 13-year-old girl. He also offered to send child [censored]ography, texting, “Yeah like other people make it like other adults make it with kids and then they send it to people…It’s against the law but they make it.” ORAN was arrested on October 31, 2017 after he traveled to a residence in Alamance County for the purpose of engaging in indecent liberties with a minor. Investigators subsequently identified a cloud storage account possessed by ORAN that contained child [censored]ography.
This case was investigated by the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office with support from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Both are members of the North Carolina Internet Crimes
Against Children (ICAC) Task Force. The ongoing Alamance County Sheriff’s Office undercover operation has resulted in multiple arrests and convictions, including I. JEFFREY BRANDEIS (https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdnc/pr/durham-man-caught-alamance-county-child-exploitation-operation-sentenced-10-years) and ADRIAN RODRIGUEZ (https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdnc/pr/two-men-sentenced-separate-incidents-attempting-sexually-exploit-minors-online).
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative by the Department of Justice to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse, and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Eric L. Iverson and Whitney N. Shaffer. Led by United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), 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, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.
