A white man in South Carolina has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man to kill his black neighbor, hang him from a tree and leave a burning cross in his yard, prosecutors said.

The man, Brandon Cory Lecroy, 26, of Greenwood, was arrested last year after a confidential source tipped off the authorities that Mr. Lecroy had reached out to an unidentified white supremacist organization seeking help in the murder.

An F.B.I. agent posing as a hit man contacted Mr. Lecroy, who told the agent over the phone, “$500 and he’s a ghost,” according to an arrest warrant affidavit. After giving the agent an initial payment of $100, he was taken into custody.

Mr. Lecroy received the maximum 10-year sentence and three years of court-ordered supervision on Friday after pleading guilty to a murder-for-hire charge, the United States attorney’s office in South Carolina said in a statement.

The attempted killing came as hate crimes are on the rise. Last year, the F.B.I. said that reports of such crimes had increased 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. That was the third straight year they had risen as issues of race increasingly dominated the political climate.

The primary motivators in hate crimes are race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation, the F.B.I. said in its report last year. Reporting hate crimes to the F.B.I. is still voluntary for law enforcement agencies, and in 2017, only 12.6 percent of federal agencies reported that a hate crime had occurred in their jurisdiction.

In Mr. Lecroy’s case, the authorities said they were tipped off in March 2018 that he had contacted the white supremacist group for help with the killing.

Mr. Lecroy went as far as texting the agent photos of two targets, including the neighbor, whom the authorities have not identified. He also provided times when it would have been best to commit the murder.

Mr. Lecroy said he planned to take over his neighbor’s property, according to an affidavit in the United States District Court in South Carolina. He also asked the agent for a “ghost gun,” or an untraceable 9-millimeter gun that had not been stolen, according to court documents. What Mr. Lecroy planned to do with the “ghost gun” was not disclosed.

After initially pleading not guilty, Mr. Lecroy withdrew his plea and pleaded guilty to one count of murder for hire.

Victims of hate crimes often do not believe that reporting their crime will help their situation, and that contributes to why many hate crimes remain unreported.

Last year, the F.B.I. said it planned to train its agents to be better at identifying and reporting hate crimes. The Justice Department has also set up a website that focuses on education and prevention of hate crimes and providing resources for victims, citizens and officials.

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