EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — In 2021, a fifteen-year-old in a small Texas town started something from his bedroom. He’d dropped out of school. He spent his days online, deep into violence and gore. He found others like him and built a network. He named it after his ZIP code: 764.

Within two years, it had spread to every continent. Members – a lot of them teenagers – were finding kids as young as nine on Minecraft and Roblox. They’d befriend them, earn their trust, then trap them. They forced children to hurt themselves on camera. To hurt animals. To do things I’m not going to describe here. That kid from Texas is serving eighty years now. But 764 didn’t stop. It splintered and kept growing.

The FBI currently has over 300 active cases in the U.S. – investigations running in every single field office across the country. They’re looking at more than 350 people tied to the network. Worldwide, authorities believe there are thousands of victims. Arrests connected to groups like 764 jumped nearly 500% in 2025 compared to 2024.

The FBI ranks 764 as a “tier one” threat. That’s the same level as ISIS. Last year, Canada became the first country to officially call 764 a terrorist organization. Not a crime ring. Not predators. Terrorists.

I ran the State Department’s programs against violent extremism. I’ve studied how terrorist groups find and recruit people for most of my career. Canada got this one right.

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What Canada Did

Calling something a terrorist organization isn’t just a label. It changes what governments can do. In Canada, the designation means that anyone who helps 764 – with money, with recruitment, with anything – is now committing a crime. Banks have to freeze assets. Immigration can block people at the border. Law enforcement gets access to tools they can’t use for regular crimes. It also sends a message. When a country puts a group on the same list as Hezbollah and the Islamic State, it tells allies, tech companies, and the public: this is serious. Pay attention.

Canada’s intelligence service says nearly one in ten of their terrorism investigations now involves a minor. Think about that. We’re not talking about kids as victims – we’re talking about kids as suspects in terrorism cases.

How They Find Kids

764 doesn’t stumble onto victims. They go looking for specific kinds of kids. Depressed kids. Lonely ones. Kids who get picked on at school. Kids who cut themselves or post about wanting to disappear. They hunt for these signs in Discord servers, on Roblox, in Minecraft – places your kid probably hangs out.

When they find someone, they’re patient. They don’t ask for anything. They just show up. They say “I get it” and “you’re not crazy” and “I’ve been there.” If you’re a thirteen-year-old who feels invisible, having someone actually listen? That hits different.

Weeks go by. Maybe months. They share darker stuff. Normalize it. Then they ask for a photo – something the kid wouldn’t want anyone to see. Once they have that, everything changes.

“Send more or we show everyone.”

Most blackmail is about money. Not 764. They want content. They make kids film themselves getting hurt. Humiliated. Some get pushed toward suicide attempts—on camera, while the network watches.

One mother told investigators her daughter carved a screen name into her arm with a razor blade. When she finished, the guy on the other end told her he loved her.

Her daughter said it back.

Victims Become Recruiters

Here’s what turns 764 from a bunch of predators into an actual network. Members earn status by producing “content.” The worse the content, the higher they climb. They keep files on their victims – records of what they made them do—and trade them like trophies. Kids who started as victims become perpetrators because that’s how you move up.

In Connecticut, a former honor roll student got caught up in 764. She ended up making bomb threats against her own school – threats phoned in by someone overseas who she thought was her friend. When police searched her devices, they found abuse images, photos of self-harm, and pictures of her paying tribute to the network. Her mom told ABC News, that “It was very difficult to process, because we didn’t raise her to engage in that kind of activity.” That’s the thing. Nobody raises their kid for this. These children get found, groomed, trapped, and turned. One researcher put it simply, “The most horrendous part is it’s minors doing this to minors.”

This Is Terrorism

I know – it sounds like the worst kind of predator ring. So why call it terrorism? Because it works exactly like the terrorist networks I’ve tracked for years. Find someone in pain. Give them a worldview that makes sense of that pain. Then get them to act on it.

764 finds broken kids and tells them the world deserves to burn. That cruelty is honesty. That hurting people is power. The ideology underneath is simple: chaos for its own sake. No political demands. No territory. Just destruction as the point.

Then they turn victims into recruiters – kids climb the ranks by trapping other kids. The ones who got groomed become the groomers. And it doesn’t stay online.

Last July, a 764 member in Minnesota stabbed a woman twenty times. In Germany, authorities arrested someone connected to the network on over 120 charges — including murder. In Finland, police are investigating whether two teen suicides are linked to 764. The network shares guides on how to plan real-world attacks. This isn’t abuse that sometimes leads to terrorism. It’s a terrorism pipeline that uses child abuse as its on-ramp.

Why the U.S. Hasn’t Moved

So Canada calls this terrorism. Why haven’t we? Our laws weren’t built for this. We’ve got tools to go after foreign terrorist groups. We’ve got tools to prosecute child predators. But 764 started in Texas, spread everywhere, and mixes exploitation with extremism in ways that confuse the system.

Right now, we’re going after these guys one at a time for the abuse. That puts individuals in prison. But it treats 764 like random criminals instead of a network with a shared playbook and a body count that keeps growing. The FBI calls it “one of the most disturbing things we’re seeing.” The Attorney General calls it “one of the most heinous online child exploitation enterprises we have ever encountered.” Meanwhile, kids keep getting trapped. The network keeps growing. And we keep treating each case like it exists in a vacuum.

Canada made a call. We should make the same one.

Cipher Brief Expert Dexter Ingram also publishes on Substack Code Name: Citizen

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