There is an urgent concern among researchers and law enforcement about a youth network engaged in the large-scale targeting, abuse, and radicalization of children. Known most prominently as the “764 Network,” the term describes a transnational extremist network of abusers who seek to cause harm in exchange for social clout.
Victims are sought out on digital spaces popular with children and that allow for easy direct communication. This occurs on platforms like X, Telegram, Facebook, Snapchat, as well as children’s video games like Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Roblox. The only prerequisite is platform popularity and access to potential targets.
Following a familiar pattern, one laid out in step-by-step manuals describing how to gain the trust of victims, targeted children are led to believe they are communicating with a peer. Perpetrators sometimes pretend to form an online romantic relationship with their victim. Once the abuser has obtained compromising information or images of the victim, they will quickly escalate into coercion, harassment, and psychological abuse, typically forcing victims to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This includes threatening to release the explicit images to a victim’s family, friends, and the public.
Other times they are exposed to neo-Nazi rhetoric and propaganda, along with graphic imagery as a means of desensitization.
In the United States alone, the FBI reports investigating over 350 individuals for involvement with 764, and cases related to the network involve victims and perpetrators across the world.
Despite a flurry of arrests and attention, the network persists. Decentralization is a key factor in this longevity. While the groups that form in the network do have clear leadership, membership is fluid, often changing rapidly, with names and aesthetics being dropped almost immediately.
Social media companies, long warned of the dangers, have often been too slow to respond. Accounts are banned and removed, but quickly resurface as the content these groups produce is shared on fringe and mainstream social media alike.
What Is the 764 Network?
The 764 Network refers to a loosely organized online network rather than a formal organization or even one group. It is often used synonymously to refer to parts of “The Com,” a network of accounts and chat servers operating across multiple platforms where young people boast about and collaborate on a variety of criminal activities.
While The Com grew primarily as a hacking and financial fraud network, it began to absorb communities involved in self-harm, the creation of gore content, promotion of extremist violence, and the exploitation of children.
These communities make up the 764 Network.
The abuse is performative in nature, and the content generated by it is used to gain notoriety within the Com ecosystem. The more horrific and degrading the content, the more social standing it provides the individual or group that obtained it.
Origin and Spread
The 764 Network derives its name from a Com group founded around 2021 by a Texas teenager from his bedroom. Bradley Chance Cadenhead named the group “764” after the first digits of his Stephenville, Texas, zip code. After his arrest in 2023, the infamy surrounding Cadenhead and his group’s links to trauma, death, and extremism spread widely, transforming the group into one of the most well-known names in the network.
Cadenhead and 764 did not emerge in a vacuum, nor are they the first of these extortion groups. While still a teenager, he had been part of other online exploitation groups like “Cvlt” (pronounced Cult) and a lesser-known group called “Greggy’s Cult” or the “Cult of Greg,” which similarly coerced and threatened children into committing depraved acts. This included self-harm such as cutting, eating their own hair or excrement, abusing animals, and the creation of CSAM over livestream. Victims were mocked and threatened, while images and videos documenting their abuse were shared on platforms like Discord and Telegram.
It was initially several high-profile cases involving Cvlt and 764 that brought public attention to the network. In 2023, Cadenhead, only 17 years old at the time, was sentenced to 80 years in prison for his role in running a global child abuse ring.
Cvlt leader Rohan Sandeep Rane of Antibes, France, was charged in January 2025 along with four others for creating a child exploitation enterprise. It was Cvlt that arguably set the tone for 764’s use of neo-Nazi and occult imagery alongside targeted child abuse.
“Cvlt espoused neo-Nazism, nihilism, and pedophilia as its core principles, in addition to others, and exposed children to material depicting and promoting these principles,” an indictment against the men from the U.S. Department of Justice said in January 2025. “This included repeated uses of Nazi symbols and language and the distribution of bondage, discipline, sadist, and masochistic (“BDSM”) and gore child pornography.”
Children who resisted were met with threats of hoax calls made to police to provoke an armed response to their homes (often called “swatting”), having their personal details and the personal details of their family released online, or the distribution of CSAM that the victims had been coerced into creating.
By 2021, Cvlt member Kaleb Merritt was facing charges for kidnapping and rape. After Rohan’s arrest in France, the group scattered, with some members moving on to 764, and eventually “Cvltist,” another splinter group.
As these changes occurred, 764 began to include explicit militant accelerationist rhetoric and imagery. Militant accelerationism is the belief that the inevitable collapse of modern civilization and liberal democracy can be hastened through the increasing of pressure on societies social divisions. This can be accomplished, in part, through acts of terrorism and violence. This was often “aesthetic adoption” intended to cultivate a fearsome image rather than genuine ideological belief, but has included crossover and interaction with existing far-right extremist networks, including the neo-Nazi occult belief system, the Order of Nine Angles (ONA), and militant accelerationist networks, like the white supremacist Terrorgram collective.
After Cadenhead’s arrest, control of 764 allegedly fell to Prasan Nepal, also known as “Trippy,” a 20-year-old North Carolina man. Nepal and another man, Leonidas Varagiannis, who used the screen name “War,” a U.S. citizen residing in Greece, are accused of running an international child exploitation enterprise. While Greece has refused to extradite Varagiannis to the United States due to his dual citizenship, he is facing charges there.
Nepal first became known in the community for creating elaborate video edits of graphic footage. These usually included a watermark of the name “Trippy” over images of bloodied corpses along with the symbols of 764.
764’s notoriety grew within the Com due to the shocking and horrific nature of the accused crimes, the young age of the victims and perpetrators, and the scale of how easily children could be targeted online. Groups using similar names and aesthetics have proliferated since the arrests. Some claimed to be versions of 764 under new leadership, while others began as entirely separate entities, but use similar techniques and tactics to find and abuse victims. These young groups often have little to no connection to the original 764, but continue to pose a threat to young and vulnerable individuals.
Intersections with Other Extremist Communities
What separates the 764 Network from other extremist networks is often the fact that political or ideological motivation is secondary to receiving attention or clout from within their social ecosystem, and their personal grievances with society as a whole. Individuals within the network will express individual ideologies, though their actions are usually not meant to result in a political outcome, only depravity.
Some individuals in the 764 Network participate in broader online spaces associated with extremist subcultures. There is often interest in gore and graphic footage. Groups in the network will create edited videos displaying group names and symbols with videos of mass casualty events like shootings or terrorist attacks, along with images of extorted victims’ self-harm.
This has led to links to propaganda networks like Terrorgram, a network of white supremacists who encouraged and promoted acts of terrorism and mass casualty violence. Participants in Terrorgram often spread the manifestos and footage of white supremacist mass killers who they referred to as “saints.”
There has also been a mixing of harm-focused groups and other Com groups dedicated to promoting offline violence. Like all of Com, these networks are participatory, meaning that, in order to be granted membership, individuals must engage in activity for the group. For so-called offline groups, sometimes called “IRL” or “in real-life” groups, these requirements can include petty vandalism like spray painting or property destruction, up to committing violent acts or even terrorism.
During a recent hearing in the Netherlands for the alleged leader of one of these offline groups, No Lives Matter, the attorney for the 24-year-old man identified only as “Justin B.” by the court, admitted that his client was the pseudonymous “Cxrpse,” the screen name of NLM’s founder and a member of 764.
Prosecutors claimed that the accused had glorified mass murderers like white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of a 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people.
“We need more people like [Tarrant],” B. allegedly wrote in messages read out in court.
In another instance, B. is alleged to have sent a video of a person being shot, and wrote, “I want to do that so much in someone’s head. Brain for my shoes, everything.”
Several photos of victims allegedly convinced or coerced into self-harm were shown with the name “Cxrpse” cut into their bodies.
In manuals released by NLM, readers are instructed on how to select victims for murder, create poisons, choose weapons, and carry out extortion. And jargon used by the ONA appears, including threats to kill “mundanes,” a term referring to people who do not follow the ONA philosophy.
Crimes, Plots and Arrests
Groups and individuals within the 764 Network operate all over the world, knowing no borders as long as there is an internet connection. Media and law enforcement investigations have reported victims and perpetrators globally. While most of the network communicates in English, there are specific groups with distinct regional and linguistic activity.
Some of the earliest criminal cases connected to the network began in the U.S., with senior members of the network arrested. One of the earliest prosecutions was of Kaleb Merritt, who began interacting with a 12-year-old child on Instagram and Discord before traveling from Texas and camping out in a wooded area near his victim’s home in Virginia. He kidnapped and raped the child in February 2021. The victim was eventually found with Merritt after the pair traveled to North Carolina.
In August 2021, Cadenhead was arrested, where it was revealed that he operated under screen names like “Bottle of Ibuprofen,” “Brad764,” and “Felix764.” His list of alleged crimes includes manipulating children into sending videos of themselves committing bodily mutilation or animal abuse; other times victims were forced to cut the screen names of their abusers into their skin on livestreams called “cutshows.” Another type of content, “blood walls,” saw victims write the names of their abusers or the groups they were affiliated with on walls in their blood.
When he was arrested, Cadenhead’s laptop was found to have 20 CSAM videos. Images on the computer showed children who had cut phrases like “I heart CP764” and “Brad is a pedo” into their skin.
A New York man, Angel Almeida, was arrested in 2023 for possession of a firearm and later charged for coercing two minors into producing CSAM. Almeida, who was known primarily as “Duck” online, was also found in possession of substantial amounts of Nazi and ONA material at the time of his arrest. Pictures from the crime scene show a patch from “Satanic Front,” a violence-focused Com group connected to the far-right occult group Tempel ov Blood.
Another man, Kyle Spitze, belonged to a 764 Network group known as “HarmNation.” He pleaded guilty to production and possession of CSAM and distributing animal crushing videos.
There were also several stabbings committed by individuals connected to the 764 Network and affiliated Com groups.
In September and October 2024, a 14 year old using the alias Slain764/NLM live streamed a series of assaults and knife attacks in the neighborhood of Hässelby in Stockholm, Sweden.
Eight videos were posted to joint NLM-764 Telegram channels, including two stabbings. Police had suspected the boy in four assaults prior to his arrest, but the investigations were closed. He admitted to stabbing an 80-year-old man when interviewed by police, but was below Sweden’s age of criminal responsibility at the time of the attack and cannot be charged criminally.
In April 2022, Nino Luciano, a 17-year-old German national live streamed to a small Discord chatroom as he stabbed a 74-year-old woman he thought was Roma. Not his first attack, Luciano used several aliases online including Tobbz764 and had attempted to murder an 82-year-old man two weeks earlier in another incident that was also shared online. Telegram chats also showed the letters MKY—the acronym for another violent Com group, the Maniac Murder Cult—scrawled in chalk near the man’s body.
The scope of the harm of the 764 Network is hard to quantify in a few court cases. Victims and criminal activity have been reported on every continent except Antarctica. Cases have been reported in the United States, as well as Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, and the United Kingdom.
Many victims go unseen and unidentified, and records are difficult to track due to laws that protect children accused of committing crimes.
Numerous law enforcement agencies have issued warnings and guidance about the networks, including Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Platforms’ Failure to Protect Children
Investigations and victim reports have repeatedly pointed to social media and gaming platforms as a point of initial contact. While there are small, hard to find, websites used by the 764 Network, perpetrators rely on these major platforms to reach new potential victims. There are few mainstream platforms where they do not have a reported presence, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and X.
The community building aspects of social media that make it a useful tool for personal networking are easily exploited by these networks, as they create large pools of potential targets. Social media platforms often also will house groups for vulnerable people already struggling with issues like eating disorders or self-harm. These communities become hunting grounds for the 764 Network, who also circulate detailed guides on how to manipulate and extort children into creating CSAM.
There is also an underbelly of fringe online spaces that support, directly or indirectly, the abuse. This includes Doxbin, a text-only website used by neo-Nazis, hackers, and The Com for years to share everything from addresses, phone numbers, and Social Insurance and Social Security numbers of their targets and enemies. Members of the 764 Network also host numerous web forums, typically including the name “farms” in the title, that serve as collaborative social spaces for the network. Here images and videos of victims can be shared publicly and privately. In other cases, victims are told to make accounts on the sites, and they become another vector for abuse.
The 764 Network’s activities have become so prevalent that several jurisdictions are taking action against the platforms themselves. Far from a free speech issue, it is a question of whether platforms that count millions of children among their most dedicated users will take meaningful steps to prevent predators from exploiting the same technology to target and harm minors.
In Washington State, a case involving a boy who took his own life after manipulation by members of the 764 Network has resulted in litigation against Discord.
Several states have also filed lawsuits against the gaming platform Roblox, alleging failure to adequately protect young users from abuse.
State Attorneys General in Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, and County Counsel in L.A. County have all announced their intention to sue Roblox for putting profits above the safety of children.
