'Modern day terrorism': How the online extremist network 764 is threatening teen lives
The FBI is investigating hundreds of suspects who may be young online predators.
On Friday, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old man in New Jersey who, according to authorities, had taken a bizarre mix of concerning actions tied to the online extremist network known as 764: He allegedly tried to blackmail teenage girls into sending him sexually explicit images of themselves, while also planning to launch ISIS-style terrorist attacks inside the United States, even allegedly stockpiling zip ties, body armor, ski masks, and books about bombmaking at his home.
Three weeks ago, Seattle-area mother Leslie Taylor wept as she and her husband visited the cemetery that now holds the ashes of their son Jay, a 13-year-old who livestreamed his suicide after authorities say he was pushed to do it by members of 764.
And four months earlier, inside a Detroit courtroom, a federal prosecutor nearly broke down in tears telling a judge -- in vivid detail -- about the brutal and gruesome videos of animal torture that another 764 member had allegedly promoted online.
"I'm sorry, I can't describe any more," the prosecutor pleaded, his voice shaking.
Those recent episodes are three stark reminders of the dangers and the depravity of 764, a loosely-knit network of sadistic predators found in nearly every part of the world. And yet, as authorities and experts agree, few Americans have ever even heard of 764.
In May, ABC News reported that the FBI was conducting 250 investigations across the country tied to 764 and similar networks. In the six months since, the FBI has opened at least 100 more investigations, and ABC News has dug even deeper into 764, trying to further understand who's behind it and what can be done to stop it.
'The more extreme, the better'
Authorities say that one of the main goals of 764 and its many affiliates is to sow chaos and destroy society. Its members find vulnerable children online, elicit private information and intimate sexual images from them, and then use that sensitive material to blackmail victims into mutilating themselves or taking other violent action -- all while streaming it on social media so others can watch and torment the victims too.
"We've looked at violent crimes against children for many years, but this just takes it to a whole different level," the former head of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, David Scott, recently told ABC News.
764 was started by Bradley Cadenhead, a 15-year-old in Stephenville, Texas, who named it after the first three digits of his local ZIP code. Born in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when teenagers were stuck inside and flocked to online spaces, 764 was an even more vicious offshoot of other online groups exploiting children through blackmail and self-harm.
With help from a teenager in North Carolina, Prasan Nepal, 764 recruited new members based on "the quality and notoriety of the content they produced," from videos of victims carving 764 members' names into their bodies to recordings of victims setting themselves on fire, according to the Justice Department.
"The more extreme, the better," explained former federal prosecutor Carin Duryee.
In Arizona, a 16-year-old named Baron Martin allegedly helped publish a "grooming" and "manipulation" guide, instructing 764 members to focus their efforts on young victims already struggling with mental health issues, according to investigators.
Since then, 764 has metastasized around the world, growing into more of an ideology than a singular group.
According to Duryee, "764" is essentially "an umbrella term" now, covering all of the offshoots and subgroups that mirror 764 but use different names to help keep social media companies and law enforcement from tracking them.
"It's hard to really put into terms the actual scope of what we're dealing with here," warned Matt Kriner, who tracks extremist movements and runs the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism in Washington.
According to Kriner, as many as 10,000 people around the world are "actively engaged" in the dark online world of 764 and related networks. Many are perpetrators, and many more are victims.
'Modern day terrorism'
Efforts to combat 764 in the U.S. are now being led by the FBI's Counterterrorism Division and the Justice Department's National Security Division, which -- after several years -- have come to understand the true nature of 764, officials say.
"Modern day terrorism in America," FBI Director Kash Patel told a Senate panel in September.
Three weeks ago, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of leveling a terrorism charge against an alleged leader within 764, Baron Martin, the Arizona native who as a teenager allegedly helped publish a guide on how to groom and extort victims.
The indictment against Martin encompasses 29 charges in all, from conspiring to provide material to terrorists, to murder-for-fire, child exploitation and cyberstalking.
According to the indictment, Martin ran barbaric "group chats" associated with 764 on social media platforms; he coerced a 13-year-old girl overseas to stomp on her hamster's head and then feed it to her dog, live on camera; and he tried to pay someone $3,000 to kill the grandmother of another victim who resisted his demands. He also called himself the "king of extortion," prosecutors said.
Martin looked "like an average kid," just a "gangly, skinny kid," but his looks were deceiving -- he was in fact a "scary and dangerous" person online, according to Duryee, who was part of the team prosecuting Martin until she left the Justice Department last month.
According to Martin's attorney, Martin will be pleading not guilty to all charges against him at an upcoming hearing.
He is just one of at least 30 people publicly charged by the Justice Department in recent years with suspected ties to 764 or affiliated networks.
Many of the charging documents against them are filled with egregious and shocking allegations, including violent sexual acts and even murder plots. They describe how members of 764 share disturbing and gory content with their victims, and promote other extreme ideologies like neo-Nazism, Satanism or even ISIS-inspired terrorism, to desensitize young victims to violence.
"There's an aim to sort of corrupt and break down our society by going after our children. They're essentially poisoning our society at the root," Duryee said.
Many 764 members also glorify past mass-casualty attacks such as the 1999 Columbine High School shooting and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which left six adults and 20 children dead.
The FBI has also been trying to determine how much 764 may have contributed to high-profile school shootings and other mass casualty attacks in recent years, including 17-year-old Solomon Henderson's deadly assault inside Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, ten months ago.
A lengthy diary that Henderson left behind, which was shared with ABC News by the Anti-Defamation League, includes two images explicitly tied to 764. Just weeks before his attack, Henderson wrote in the diary that he wanted to "do a stabbing like Tobbz," referring to a teenager in Romania who reportedly tattooed "764" on his arm and in 2022 livestreamed his fatal stabbing of a 74-year-old woman.
Several others associated with 764 have been arrested by state authorities, including Cadenhead, the founder of 764, who is serving an 80-year prison sentence in Texas after pleading guilty to child pornography-related charges.
In June, with help from the FBI, local police in Oregon arrested a 14-year-old boy who, according to the bureau, "pledged allegiance" to 764 and was allegedly planning a "mass shooting and explosives attack" on a local mall.
The boy, charged with attempted murder and several other charges, repeatedly told authorities after his arrest that he never intended to follow through with his plan and that he was pushed into it by 764, according to his attorney. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
But the head of the FBI’s Portland field office, Doug Olson, insisted at the time that authorities "prevented a tragic event in our community."
Despite making progress against 764, state and federal investigators have faced significant challenges along the way, in particular because U.S. federal law makes it harder to prosecute minors -- who make up the majority of 764 perpetrators -- and because several foreign governments have resisted U.S. government efforts to extradite offenders captured overseas.
'A false sense of security'
For the past several years, both Republican and Democratic voices on Capitol Hill have been calling on platforms to more aggressively fight online predators.
In May, a bipartisan group of senators reintroduced the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would compel platforms to provide minors and parents with a series of "readily-accessible and easy-to-use safeguards," though it would not grant parents access to their children's private messages.
The bill was previously approved, by a vote of 91 to 3, in the Senate -- but it languished in the House, with some representatives expressing concern that it didn't go far enough to protect users' First Amendment rights.
Last year, after a member of a network like 764 coerced a Virginia teen into attempting suicide, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Discord, demanding to know "about the company's failure to safeguard minors and stop the proliferation of violent predatory groups," such as 764.
"[D]espite increased moderation, predators continue to target minors on your platform," Warner wrote.
In an interview with ABC News, Warner said Congress needs to pass "basic bills like the Kids Online Safety Act."
"This is a problem that ... if we don't do something, potentially could get worse," Warner said.
Experts warn that there are limitations to what platforms can actually do, especially because "a lot of this activity" occurs in "very small spaces" that are "difficult to monitor," Kriner, of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism in Washington, said. Platforms are also "inundated" with predators who "have numerous fallback profiles and accounts," Kriner said.
Meanwhile, others said there needs to be a law that makes it a crime to push someone to harm themselves online.
"[It's] a total crime," Warner said. "Even though it's through digital connection."
Experts said it's important for parents -- and the rest of the public -- to recognize the threat of 764.
"[Parents] have a false sense of security because their child is home, their child is right there," Duryee said. "And that's a terrible mistake to assume that there is safety in that setting."
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recently reported that in the first half of this year it received 1,000 reports of abuse tied to 764 or similar networks -- after receiving 1,300 such reports in all of last year.
Experts said that to help keep their children safe, parents should make sure to pay attention to their children's activities, engage with them about online predators, and maybe even keep devices out of their children's bedrooms.
"Young kids don't always communicate with their parents very well, but you got to keep trying," Duryee said. "Have them show us some of their games. ... Maybe discuss some of these news pieces with them, discuss some of these cases with them, ask them what they think about it -- have they ever seen something like this happen?"
ABC News' Megan Christie, Pierre Thomas and Juju Chang contributed to this report.
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