Expert: Violent 764 group a ‘growing problem’ targeting vulnerable kids online

A number of violent extremist groups, led by minors and young adults, are increasingly targeting kids online — in some cases, with deadly results.

And as federal officials, counterterrorism experts and child advocates sound the alarm, parents need to take action amid the “growing problem,” a scholar at a Catholic university told OSV News.

“There is a naive view of the dangers that are currently online,” said Mary Graw Leary, professor of law at the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

Leary, a former federal prosecutor and an expert on technology and victimization, said that despite ongoing efforts to protect children and youth in the digital space, “we see law enforcement issuing more and more warnings.”

In particular, those alerts — which several FBI field offices have issued in recent months — are focusing on 764, a loosely affiliated network of online communities that prey on vulnerable youth, typically coercing them to produce sexually explicit material, and then blackmailing them to harm themselves as well as others, even beloved family pets.

The 764 group was founded in 2021 by then-15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead, a Texas teen raised in a devout Christian family that later unraveled, with Cadenhead — who also experienced bullying — growing increasingly angry, distressed and isolated, according to 2024 in-depth investigation by The Washington Post.

Amid that downturn, Cadenhead — now serving an 80-year jail term for multiple child pornography offenses — took to the social media platform Discord to create a community space where he and other like-minded users harassed and exploited victims, promoting (as he wrote) “cp (child pornography) and gore.”

Cadenhead — who repeatedly eluded Discord’s largely user-moderated safety protocols, creating new user accounts whenever he was kicked off the platform — wrote to a user in one July 2021 chat message, “i can give you a guide on how to kill yourself 10 different ways that are very descriptive. … i wanna watch somebody kill themselves in vc (video chat),” according to The Washington Post.

Named after the first three digits of Cadenhead’s ZIP code in Stephenville, Texas, 764 operates across almost all social media platforms and communities, most prominently Telegram, Discord, Roblox, X, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, according to a 2025 report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a multinational research organization specializing in countering extremism.

In addition, 764 activity has been detected on Minecraft, Fortnite, Twitch, Steam and Snapchat, said ISD in its report.

Along with related sextortion networks, 764’s scale is “global,” with some Telegram groups counting 15,000 users at once, and in-person violence involving or inspired by 764 members taking place in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Sweden, said ISD.

Group members commonly connect with victims through online groups focused on mental health disorders, gaming and e-girl subculture, a TikTok trend in which girls embrace a mixture of gothic and anime fashion, makeup and music.

Leary noted that online predators in general are “looking for any vulnerability they can find,” but 764 members “seem to have a special goal for people with mental health or deep insecurity vulnerabilities.”

One Seattle-area couple recently filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the social media platform Discord, arguing the company aided in the suicide of their 13-year-old son, Jay Taylor, by abetting 764, “one of the most depraved and dangerous child abuse cults in modern history.”

Victims’ ages typically range from 10 to 17 years old, with the FBI identifying some victims as young as 9 years old.

Among the self-harm activities encouraged by 764 are “blood signs,” with victims carving perpetrators’ real or online names onto their bodies as a sign of loyalty. Victims also use their own blood to create such signs on other surfaces, such as walls, sending images to group members to prove their loyalty and submission.

“If you’re interested in domination and demonstrating your control over another person, getting them to physically harm themselves and you being able to see it … is a very tangible way of doing that,” said Leary.

ISD said in its report that such “cutsigns” underscore that “often the self-harm perpetrated within 764 spaces is more extreme than other forms of ‘cutting,'” with “indicators of 764-linked
self-harm … more complex and varied than scarred forearms.”

The insidious dynamic of the 764 group works to trap its targets in a cycle of revictimization, and its perpetrators in an escalating cycle of in-person violence.

Once they have coerced vulnerable children into producing child sexual abuse material, 764 members harass and intimidate victims to silence them, perpetuating the abuse. At the same time, current and prospective 764 members resort to “assault, animal abuse, and attempted murder to impress other members of the network and gain social standing,” according to ISD’s 2025 report.

And, experts note, perpetrators — often only slightly older than those they exploit — coerce their victims to commit such atrocities not because of any cohesive ideology, but out of sheer hatred and hopelessness.

For that reason, such groups are broadly classified by law enforcement and researchers as “nihilistic violent extremists,” or NVEs.

Among such extremists are those “seeking to destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

In December, Canada became the first nation to name 764 as a terrorist group.

In the U.S., the FBI is currently conducting at least 250 investigations involving the 764 group, and federal authorities have arrested several members over the past few years.

Back on Feb. 17, two U.S. lawmakers — Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), chair of the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement, wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for a staff-level briefing on that agency’s efforts to counter the 764 group.

Experts also note the 764 group’s use of satanic and Nazi symbolism, part of the “shared visual aesthetics” with similar groups that also traffic in child sexual abuse material, extortion and violence.

And in the murky realms of cyberspace, such communities intersect, compounding the threat they pose to individuals and society.

In a 2024 analysis published by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, researchers Marc-André Argentino, Barrett G. and M.B. Tyler noted that although 764 members have been arrested due to child sexual abuse material charges, they “initially became known to law enforcement following tips from anonymous individuals or schools in the U.S., UK, and Romania regarding plans to commit acts of mass violence.”

Citing court documents, Argentino and his colleagues said that “764 members consistently reveal inclinations towards acts of both interpersonal and public violence.”

A “convergence” of “terrorist and violent extremism content” and child sexual abuse material “is mediated through digital platforms and ecosystems, particularly those linked to the gaming space,” they wrote.

At least one research group has determined that NVE radicalization may have played a significant role in the deadly August 2025 shooting during a school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis.

In an Aug. 28, 2025, executive summary, the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism said the self-deceased attacker, Robin Westman, had been “heavily motivated” by “militant accelerationism mass shooter culture,” and “potentially connected to nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) ecosystems online.”

“Westman represents a growing trend within targeted violence wherein individuals attack an apparent symbolic target (though likely driven more by personal grievance with the target) and have little to no specific ideological motivation for the attack nor the target,” said ICDE in its summary.

Leary said that while children and vulnerable persons have throughout history been at risk of abuse and exploitation, groups such as 764 show that “the internet provides access to large groups of victims” for predators.

And, she said, the internet and such deviant subgroups “provide affinity and normalization” for the worst of human behavior.

“We’ve got people supporting each other’s perverse, violent proclivities in a way that we didn’t see before,” she said. “These channels are fueling this in a way that didn’t exist.”

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