A former Marine who exploited roughly two dozen minors, including by posing as a teenage girl online, was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday. He extorted multiple victims into creating child sexual abuse material and threatened to release it to their friends and family.
Anthony Fritzinger, 25, committed the offenses while he was an active-duty lance corporal in the Marine Corps at Cherry Point, North Carolina, according to his indictment and service record. His criminal conduct was first discovered in 2020 when he used an anonymous account to threaten an 18-year-old woman with the release of nude pictures taken when she was a minor, which her family reported to local police.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which led the investigation into Fritzinger, found that he had been serially stalking, soliciting and extorting minors for years and discovered a “vast quantity” of sexually explicit chats with children, as well as images and videos depicting victims as young as toddlers on his personal electronic devices, according to the Justice Department.
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“The scope on this one, unfortunately, is a little bit different than a lot that we see,” Erin Carmichael, executive assistant director leading the NCIS criminal investigations and operations division, told Military.com in an interview on Friday, referring to the substantial number of victims, who were located in several states across the country.
He said NCIS was able to leverage its ability to cover multiple jurisdictions given its federal reach, reducing the burden of a local police department from potentially having to contact dozens of jurisdictions across the country, and that agents scoured Fritzinger’s digital footprint to uncover his extortion scheme beyond the initial allegation in 2020.
“NCIS really tries to take that next step where we look at all the digital media. We don’t just look at the initial allegation and attempting to prove the elements or disprove those related to that one incident,” Carmichael said. After the initial report, agents established probable cause for a command-authorized search and seizure, which led them to discover evidence in the “cyber arena of the bad acts by this Marine,” he said.
The DOJ said Fritzinger used “teen ‘dating’ websites” to lure minors into his scheme and then “exerted total control over them and required them to perform sadistic, sexual punishments.”
Fritzinger, who served less than three years in the Marine Corps as a ground electronics transmissions systems maintainer, according to his service record, also manipulated the victims into sending him explicit media by falsely claiming he was dying, the DOJ said. Several of the victims testified against Fritzinger in court, and he was convicted in 2024.
“This defendant preyed on vulnerable children, manipulating and threatening them to produce explicit content for his own gratification,” Acting U.S. Attorney Daniel Bubar for the Eastern District of North Carolina said in a department press release Thursday. “This case should also serve as a strong reminder that the proliferation of social media has expanded the manner in which young people can be targeted by individuals like Fritzinger, who look to exploit them.”
Fritzinger’s attorney, W. James Payne, told Military.com on Friday that while “we obviously fought very hard and were disappointed in the outcome of the case, it’s always important to know that you’re going to get a fair trial despite what you may be charged with.”
He said Fitzinger intended to appeal the sentencing, but that the judge in the case, Richard Myers II, “exercised a great deal of compassion” when delivering the sentence, “not only for Mr. Fritzinger, but for the victims in the case.”
Carmichael said that, in general, predators leverage anonymity on the internet and try to obfuscate their exploitation of children using VPNs and cryptocurrency gift cards to extort payment for abuse material. He said NCIS has a crime reduction program, to include engaging with parents and community members to educate them about online risks for children.
“What you send on the internet is forever,” Carmichael said, adding that children and the elderly are often susceptible to various scams, but don’t always come forward. “So helping kids understand that, especially in the social media age that we live in, where people want to really post their whole life, that people may use what they post for nefarious reasons.”
Carmichael said that, in part due to President Donald Trump’s early executive orders cracking down on human trafficking and online child exploitation, NCIS mandated this month that all of its field offices open a “proactive operation” in the cyber space to catch predators before they harm children, something that it had been doing to various degrees for years, but is now solidified across the board.
Part of that effort tasks agents to go undercover online to identify how predators navigate websites they frequent and pose as potential victims to “identify bad actors proactively.” Carmichael said that this week, 20 agents trained and were certified in the Internet Crimes Against Children program.
With these measures, he said “that’s where we can help identify subjects that may go undetected,” much like an undercover agent would do so for narcotics or human trafficking. “Sometimes it’s really tough to catch folks, unless you are able to understand how they operate and then create scenarios similar to that to help identify them.”
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