Ex-Merseyside firefighter found guilty of sexually abusing 13-year-old girl
A former Merseyside firefighter has been found guilty of grooming and engaging in sexual activity with a 13-year-old girl.
Today, (10 October 2025) a jury at Liverpool Crown Court has found Scott Cameron, 40, from Liverpool, guilty of ten offences against the teenager between 2022 and 2024.
Cameron, who was suspended and then dismissed by Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, claimed he thought the girl was 16, despite the fact she had written that she was 13 in an early communication with staff at the station where he worked.
Cameron was then 37 years old.
Staff from the station had attended a school in Merseyside for a community activity and the victim contacted them with a handwritten card from her and her friend, addressed to another firefighter, telling him that they admired him and how much they had enjoyed the visit.
Cameron saw the card, which included the victim’s phone number, and began to contact her via text and then social media, pretending to be the firefighter it was addressed to. He told the victim that she was "gorgeous" and made her feel special. An image of the childish, handwritten card was found on Cameron's phone when he was arrested.
The messages became overtly sexual and he asked her for pictures of herself, partially dressed. He started to demand nude photographs and backed up the demands with threats that he was going to stop talking to her and would circulate the other pictures she had sent him. He even offered to pay her for photographs.
Secret meetings continued over the coming months and Cameron engaged in serious sexual activity with her several times. The matter came to the attention of the police when they had cause to review messages on the victim’s phone in relation to a different investigation and found sexualised messages between her and the defendant.
Cameron repeatedly lied to the police by claiming that he had not engaged in any sexual activity or communication with the victim and even went as far as to suggest that the victim had been harassing him.
Cameron would eventually come to admit that he had engaged in sexual activity with the victim when he was faced with incontrovertible evidence. However, he insisted that he believed her to be 16 and that he had never contacted her pretending to be the other fireman. The jury saw through these lies and found him guilty on all counts.
Senior Crown Prosecutor Georgiana Panteli, of CPS Mersey-Cheshire, said: "Scott Cameron is a manipulative paedophile whose own wishes and desires were all that mattered to him. He has told lies, in fact multiple lies, and the biggest lie was to suggest that he hadn’t had a sexual relationship with the victim, when he eventually admitted that he had.
“The Crown Prosecution Service's case was that this wasn’t a one off or chance meeting that led to an inappropriate relationship, but the chronicle of an adult man exercising his own choices, who knew exactly what he was doing, who used all of his wider gained experience, and who abused his position of power as a fireman, to groom, exploit and sexually abuse an impressionable young girl who was the object of his attention and who admired him for his profession.
“The victim was vulnerable to the advances of Cameron and the attention he gave her. Our case was that it would have been obvious to him that she was a very young teenager because he had seen the card she had delivered to the fire station, and because she then told him how old she was.
"Merseyside Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have supported the victim and other young witnesses to give their best evidence in this case. We would like to praise them for their perseverance and courage. Without them, we wouldn't have a prosecution and we wouldn’t have been able to hold this dangerous man to account.”