A Hughesville man will serve six months in county work-release for chatting with whom he thought was a 13-year-old girl over Facebook.

Scott Bigger, 33, was “bored and unemployed and just looking for conversation,” according to his wife, when he chatted on three separate occasions with an undercover police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl on Facebook during the winter of 2012.

“(The conversation) was explicit, at least on the fringes,” said Judge Marc Lovecchio during Bigger’s sentencing hearing. “The police officer was doing her job and tried to get it to go a step further and invited him over – and the defendant said no.”

“Eventually the conversations ended because Mr. Bigger blocked her Facebook page,” said Assistant District Attorney Aaron Biichle. “My experience is if an individual has a history of this, we’re going to find keepsakes on the computer. That wasn’t the case in this case.”

A relative of Bigger’s who has children testified during the hearing.

“My first motherly instinct was ‘stay away from my kid,’ ” she said. “But we talked and I changed my mind … my 13-year-old daughter has known him since she was 8 or 9, and she never in any way seems to shy away from him.”

“One of the problems we have with the Internet is a vast segment of our society is exposed to things it would’ve never been exposed to before,” Lovecchio said. “The cyberworld has created a fantasy for so many people, it’s tough to relate on a person-to-person level.”