Rene Mattheus, digital safety attorney and child online safety consultant, has explained how online extremist groups 764 and "The Com" lure young people into committing destructive acts.
764, the loose online network that the FBI has deemed a tier-one terrorist, extremist organisation, is now suspected to be operating in South Africa.
Active since at least 2020, the group exploits gaming-friendly, non-threatening digital environments to reach victims and other members, specifically Discord, Fortnite and Roblox.
Earlier this month, a 16-year-old Western Cape teen was arrested for accessing, possession, facilitation and downloading of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Allegedly caught in the act, the teen was linked to 764 by SAPS intelligence. A number of child victims were identified following the arrest.
The 764 network was allegedly founded by a teen from Texas, Bradley Cadenhead, who is currently serving an 80-year prison sentence for possession of CSAM.
Like many online extremist groups, the organisation has continued beyond its originator. Members of the group connect with other children and actively encourage acts of violence and self-harm.
A July report from The Guardian explained that 764 had expanded into a broad online network of different groups that engage in cybercrime, extortion and violence, collectively known as “The Com”.
Short for “The Community”, members coerce children as young as nine into violence against other children and animals, and even suicide.
Rene Mattheus, a South African cybercrime and digital safety attorney and child online safety consultant, explained how the group connects with young children through gaming platforms.
“They are extremely manipulative. They will come across friendly, they will come across flattering and try to relate to children in order to create some form of kinship,” she said.
“Once the child trusts the extortioner after a period of days or weeks, they start asking for things. They start manipulating them, asking to send photos.”
She explained that once they have compromising photos of the victim, they go from friendly to hostile. They use the photos to coerce their victims, asking for more photos.
These images could be nude photos of the victim, photos of them in sex acts, or evidence of them doing something illegal.
They begin to threaten the release of the photos and make the victims feel like they are responsible. These threats then escalate to violence as victims are coerced into carrying out and documenting acts.
For example, victims may be coerced into recording video of themselves attacking and assaulting someone to increase their standing within the group.
Rene Mattheus, cybercrime and digital safety attorney and director of Pattern Interrupt Consulting
Mattheus said that in one case she was aware of, it took 34 minutes from the time a child shared a nude image of themselves to the point where they committed suicide.
The Com group members overwhelm their victims across all their social media feeds and online platforms, usually safe spaces for these children.
“Kids are so terrified of losing their cell phones or their tablets or access to their apps that they feel that it is almost a worse threat than what affects them,” she said.
“Because their whole lives are spent on these games and on these platforms.”
Mattheus said that the majority of The Com members are young people, aged 11 to 22. Their biological immaturity plays a significant role in why youth join these predatory groups.
Alongside this, psychological research in the past has shown how online socialisation can cause people to enter a dissociative state, where they form “alter egos” of themselves.
These alter egos then carry out actions that these people would normally never carry out outside of these digital worlds, including sextortion and coercion.
“A lot of people, especially children, have this perception that the online world is not the real world. It very much is real, in that what happens online can have real-world implications,” Mattheus said.
She said there was also a malicious gratification that drove members of The Com, where teen extortionists “literally get off on terrorising people.”
This was coupled with a loss of empathy driven by overexposure to digital environments where they spend most of the time interacting with digital avatars and chat bubbles.
Past academic literature has also identified the digital psychological phenomenon known as “the lulz”, which first emerged on image boards like 4chan and 8chan.
It should be noted that the lulz can be playfully dark rather than nihilistic, such as when 4chan mobbed an online poll of Villa Italian Kitchen in 2012 to name an exclusive new flavour of Mountain Dew.
Among the top names submitted by 4chan members was “Diabeetus”. The restaurant conceded its contest had “lost to the Internet”.
However, the lulz — a corruption of LOL, as in “we did it because it was funny” — in many ways continues to capture the malicious amusement or enjoyment at harming others on the Internet.
A 2019 study published in the Journal of Personality found that online trolling was motivated by sadistic tendencies and was linked to the Dark Triad of antisocial behaviours.
Mattheus highlighted the risk that South African teens who exist in digital spaces could become connected to The Com in two distinct ways.
Either they could be targeted as victims, because they play the same games as others worldwide, or they could be recruited as perpetrators, such as the alleged 16-year-old offender from the Western Cape.
