OAKLAND — The case started when Santa Clara District Attorney investigators began searching for a missing 13-year-old girl, who was reportedly being trafficked in Vallejo.
By the case’s end, authorities say they collected evidence the eighth grader was being passed between multiple groups of human traffickers around the Bay Area. One of them ended up being sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty. Another man, 27-year-old Tobias Scollay, is in the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin with a pending federal case.
But the allegations against Scollay don’t end there. Prosecutors say he trafficked four teens, aged 13 to 19, sexually abused two of the minor victims and beat up the 19-year-old. They further allege he recruited the teens at a “rapid fire” pace and continued from inside jail and prison, where he’d call and video chat with one of the girls who was 15 at the time.
On May 27, federal prosecutors filed a new criminal complaint — on top of one filed against him last year — charging him with sex trafficking of children from June to December 2023. He pleaded not guilty on Thursday and is next due in court June 26, records show.
Scollay has been in jail since last August, and will remain there until his case is resolved. The magistrate judge who signed off on his detention cited allegations that he continued to contact sex trafficking victims from Los Angeles County Jail and a state prison in Vacaville. The judge also cited that Scollay has a warrant for a missed court appearance in San Francisco.
Authorities allege that Scollay recruited the 13-year-old girl in the Bay Area, after she’d already been trafficked by a number of other people. She told police he brought her to a store that specifically sells clothes for prostitution on the 1900 block of Fruitvale Avenue in Oakland and took her to “the blade” — a slang term for open air sex markets — in Oakland and Vallejo.
She said she told him she was 18, but that she believed he knew it was a lie, according to the criminal complaint. Scollay allegedly recruited the 15-year-old girl while he and the 19-year-old were together in Los Angeles, and he allegedly recruited the 17-year-old girl through Instagram.
Scollay was arrested in Los Angeles in July 2023, but continued to talk to the 15-year-old online, including in a 2024 video chat where he encouraged her to masturbate on camera for him, prosecutors say. Over six months of his incarceration, Scollay continued to encourage her to “engage in sex work” for him and discouraged her from cooperating with police, prosecutors said in court filings.
“Had (Scollay) not been arrested…there is every reason to believe that he would have continued to find and exploit more vulnerable girls,” prosecutors said in a motion to detain him. “Nor did Scollay stop at exploiting his victims for commercial gain. He also exploited them for his own sexual gratification.”
All three girls were trafficked by other people during the same time frame, according to an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, who said authorities identified multiple other “trafficking groups” during the investigation of Scollay.