All of this happened on Discord, the immensely popular chat app, on a server known as “Cultist.” According to Ali, the goal was “to be the most evil.” If that sounds childish, that’s because it was. The abuse consisted of children victimizing other children. The community sustains itself on a cycle of violence in which victims, after sustaining immense abuse and trauma, turn into abusers themselves—often because they see it as the only way to escape their situation. VICE News has investigated this group for over a year and has found a sextortion ring that spans the globe and revels in the worst content imaginable. This reporting, based on information from victims, court documents, and interviews with experts, describes a community where children push other children into horrific self-harm, all for the sake of cruelty and clout—and all on some of the world’s most powerful platforms. Since being birthed half a decade or so ago, its activities, the scope of which isn’t clear even to the best-informed experts, have resulted in scores of victims and inspired several vigilantes, even as its ties to an occult neo-Nazi group and sensationalized descriptions of them have given rise to what amounts to a satanic panic.If you or somebody you know are being targeted or abused by sextortionists you do have options. If you can’t reach out to a loved one or law enforcement you can reach out to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and/or use their Take It Down app to anonymously remove your images from most platforms.
“On stream, she cut her entire body for them. She would do this sometimes daily. They called them cut shows. They would have her cut things into herself…”
‘The absolute worst, most vile form of human taboo’
While it’s impossible to determine exactly how widespread the issue is, researchers who have investigated 764 for years tell VICE News they estimate the number of victims of organized sextortion groups to be in the hundreds. Collectively the members of 764 boast that they have left thousands of children traumatized; this is almost certainly not the case. As in many other online communities, clout is the ultimate goal of 764, and to be on top, you need to be the scariest, the baddest person. Exaggerations of both the depravity of the group and the number of its victims need not be taken at face value—the truth is bad enough.‘To have a girl that you're grooming, that 'it's her first time,’ was the goal for a lot of them.’
The group chats, which take place on both Telegram and Discord, are large, unruly things that are hard to keep track of. Almost all of the grooming typically happens in direct messages, where predators use a variety of tactics including love bombing or tricking a victim with photos of a minor they had previously sextorted. The group recruits from a wide array of sources, which include traditional social media platforms as well as games like Minecraft and Roblox.“There were also a few cases where they would (force) people who had younger siblings to either do something to the younger sibling…”
You Can Get Help
Some of the victims that VICE News spoke to about 764 found themselves going back into the communities to see if their content continued to be shared. Jessie told VICE News she knows that her former abuser is using her images to catfish minors into his sextortion ring and that she is in a continuous battle to counter it.‘So many children feel a lack of hope and feel a lot of despair in those moments and we have seen children that have taken their own lives…’
Like any enterprising online community looking for members, the group finds its victims in an array of places. A GNET piece written by Marc-André Argentino, Barrett Gay, and M.B. Tyler called “764: The Intersection of Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and Child Sexual Exploitation” is the best piece of literature publicly available about the group. In it, the authors write that 764 has a “presence on YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Twitch, TikTok, Steam, Mega, and Roblox,” which they use for both promotion and recruitment. What’s more, the group is sharing tips on how to snare young people into its web.If you have any knowledge about 764 sextortion groups or the Order of Nine Angles, please feel free to reach out to Mack Lamoureux and VICE News in confidence at mack.lamoureux@VICE.com.
Jessie said even after she removed herself from the abuse at times she would be targeted again. In some cases her former abuser even contacted her current partner to brag about what he did to her. But now, since she’s spoken to people and gotten help, he doesn’t wield the same power he once did. “He’s unsettling, very unsettling. There is something wrong with him. It's like there's like a light in his head that's actually missing,” Jessie told VICE News. “But I’m not scared of him, like at all.”“The stuff that ends up on my phone by joining these groups to try and see where he's sending my nudes and when I see these minors being like harmed, it's a lot…”
A growing problem
‘Child pornography is probably (his) least egregious crime’
Traps and propaganda
O9A has been the focus of researchers and law enforcement for years now, and it has been tied to multiple crimes, including many involving CSAM. At the risk of simplifying a complicated group, the goal of O9A is to weaken society by attacking taboos and norms, and few things are more taboo than CSAM. To push their goal they infiltrate other groups and try to distort them to their own end. The group's influence could be prominently found in neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like Atomwaffen and The Base.‘It wasn’t ever like ‘you’re doing this for Satan’ or even brought up.’
Cyber vigilantism
Surviving an online hell
She wants other young people to not implicitly trust someone because they’re younger. “You don't think that a 17-year-old is going to be an awful pedophilic pervert or someone who could cause harm to you because you associate age with power a lot of the time. So I think it's really important to realize that even though they might be close to your age they are not normal people, and they do have the capacity to hurt you or to harm you, to extort you.”Furthermore, she wants others who have been in her situation to know it’s not their fault. That you can escape the hold your abusers have on you and come out the other side. Those she was dealing with followed through on their threats and sent content of her to her parents and said the worst-case scenario was survivable. “It's not your fault that they took the person you are and manipulated it to extort you,” she said. “You can get out of it. You can talk to the police. You can get protection if you're worried about them doing something to you or your family. A lot of it is empty threats to get you to continuously comply.“There is a way out. Talk to someone. It’s better than constantly feeling trapped in a situation like that.”If you or somebody you know are being targeted or abused by sextortionists you do have options. If you can’t reach out to a loved one or law enforcement you can reach out to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and/or use their Take It Down app to anonymously remove your images from most platforms.‘You can get out of it’
This story has been updated to reflect the fact Discord has been knowledgable about 764 and combatting it since 2021.