A 32-year-old New Orleans man has been sentenced to 360 months — 30 years — in federal prison after pleading guilty to running an online scheme that tricked and threatened children as young as 7 into sending him explicit photos and videos. Cole Diggs used the alias Kevon Godson and posed as a teenager to reach at least six victims, ranging in age from 7 to 15, before threatening them when they tried to refuse or stop, according to federal officials.
U.S. District Judge Barry W. Ashe handed down the sentence, which also requires Diggs to serve 15 years of supervised probation after his release, register permanently as a sex offender, and pay restitution to his victims, as reported by Tampa Free Press. Diggs pleaded guilty to producing files depicting the sexual exploitation of children under 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a), the primary federal statute covering the creation of child sexual abuse material, according to the Department of Justice. Federal guidelines for that offense set a mandatory minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 30 years for a first offense, meaning Judge Ashe imposed the statutory ceiling and had no legal path to a lighter term.
How the Scheme Unfolded
According to investigators, Diggs carried out the abuse over a 13-month span in 2021 and 2022, using a photo-and-video messaging app to strike up sexual conversations with minors while posing as a peer. Per the Tampa Free Press report, he gave children specific instructions for posing in photos and videos, then bought, traded, and shared the explicit images of minors he collected. When victims tried to back out, he threatened them into continuing, and he also sent adult images to some of the children he targeted.
The FBI ran the investigation, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Spiro G. Latsis prosecuted the case for the government, the outlet noted. Jonathan Tapp, head of the FBI's New Orleans office, said Diggs's actions impacted families across the country, not just in Louisiana, underscoring how far the reach of a single online predator can extend.
Officials Call the Case a Warning
U.S. Attorney David I. Courcelle said the sentence sends a clear message, stating, “Today's sentence removes a dangerous, anti-social predator from our community.” Courcelle described Diggs's crimes against children as cruelly manipulative and said the punishment matched the severity of what the victims endured, adding that he hoped the outcome would bring security, peace, and closure to victims and their families.
Tapp said the sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who might coerce or abuse children online, and both his office and the U.S. Attorney's Office reaffirmed their commitment to identifying, locating, and bringing child predators to justice. The FBI and prosecutors said they stand ready to pursue similar cases going forward.
A Case Years in the Making
Court records show the case against Diggs was originally opened in January 2023 under a sealed docket in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, a common practice in online exploitation cases meant to protect juvenile victims during the early stages of investigation, per PacerMonitor. A federal grand jury later charged him in a nine-count superseding indictment in 2023 that included production and attempted production of child sexual abuse material, interstate extortion, and distribution and receipt of illicit material, according to the Department of Justice. The extortion charge alone, transmitting threats across state lines under 18 U.S.C. § 875(d), carried a maximum of two years per count before Diggs's guilty plea narrowed the case.
The prosecution was carried out under Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide Department of Justice initiative launched in 2006 to coordinate federal, state, and local resources against online child exploitation. Local records also show Diggs had a prior arrest by the New Orleans Police Department in April 2017 on a simple assault charge in the city's Fourth District, stemming from a targeted enforcement operation in Algiers.
Part of a Broader Pattern
Diggs's case is not the only Project Safe Childhood prosecution to come through Judge Ashe's courtroom recently. In a separate case, New Orleans resident Mark Brooks pleaded guilty before Judge Ashe in November after an FBI undercover operation caught him trying to send obscene material to a minor online, Hoodline previously reported.
National data underscores how widespread these schemes have become. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children recorded more than 50,000 CyberTipline reports involving online sextortion of minors in 2025 alone, reflecting a pattern in which predators often make first contact on public social apps before shifting conversations to private messaging platforms. Under federal sentencing rules, Diggs also owes a mandatory special assessment fee for each count of conviction, on top of the restitution meant to cover therapy and recovery costs for his victims.
