Registered sex offender from Camden, NJ, gets nearly 22 years in prison

A Camden man has been sentenced to over two decades in prison for trafficking multiple minors to engage in commercial sex acts.

Back in May, 34-year-old Semaj A. Gilmore pleaded guilty to three counts of a superseding indictment charging him with sex trafficking minors.

On Thursday, he was sentenced to 260 months, or almost 22 years, behind bars.

Federal authorities say from September 2020 to April 2021, Gilmore transported, at various times, three minors, all under the age of 18, from Philadelphia to New Jersey knowing they would engage in a commercial sex act at his direction. During that period, Gilmore had been required to register as a sex offender as a result of a prior conviction.

According to an initial press release from the Department of Justice, one of those juveniles was a missing child from Pennsylvania.

In April 2021, investigators learned that a missing juvenile from Pennsylvania was being advertised for sexually illicit activities on a website that is often used to advertise acts of prostitution. On April 13, 2021, an undercover agent contacted a phone number associated with the advertisement. The undercover agent and the user of the phone number, later revealed to be Gilmore, exchanged a series of messages that ultimately led to the undercover agent meeting the victim in a motel room in or around Mount Laurel, New Jersey, purportedly to engage in sexual activities in exchange for cash. Gilmore instructed the undercover agent to “get condoms” and to confirm that he was not “a cop.” When uniformed officers entered the motel room, Gilmore, who had been waiting in a car in the adjacent parking lot, fled. Officers stopped Gilmore’s car and recovered the phone used to arrange the meeting between the victim and the undercover agent.

Once out of prison, Gilmore will be under a decade of supervised release.

U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger credited special agents of the FBI’s South Jersey Resident Agency, the Mount Laurel Police Department, and the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office for their work in this case.