Illustration: Chris Burnett: GETTY IMAGES

WIRED collaborated with Der Spiegel, Recorder, and The Washington Post on this reporting. Each wrote separate stories that the news organizations agreed to publish in tandem. This story contains descriptions of abuse, self-harm, murder, and suicide. Reader discretion is advised.

It sounds like a cheap true-crime conspiracy: An international network of predators steeped in Satanism lure children from seemingly harmless online platforms like Discord, Minecraft, and Roblox and extort them to sexually exploit and grievously harm themselves. Some victims are even pushed to suicide.

Except it’s true.

A reporting consortium including Der Spiegel, Recorder, The Washington Post, and WIRED has unearthed a sprawling ecosystem that has targeted thousands of people and victimized dozens, if not hundreds, of children using some of the internet’s biggest platforms. Law enforcement believes the “com” network encompasses a swath of interlocking groups with thousands of users, including hundreds of hardcore members who victimize children through coordinated online campaigns of extortion, doxing, swatting, and harassment.

This reporting consortium has obtained and analyzed more than 3 million messages from more than 50 chat groups on Discord and Telegram. The messages expose multiple com subgroups and thousands of users in nearly a dozen countries on three continents. Our investigation found ample evidence of predatory conduct and a persistent presence across apps including Telegram and Discord, while WIRED also found com activity on Instagram, SoundCloud, and Roblox. The platforms are aware of these groups, but they have yet to successfully eradicate them.

The abuse perpetrated by members of com groups is extreme. They have coerced children into sexual abuse or self-harm, causing them to deeply lacerate their bodies to carve “cutsigns” of an abuser’s online alias into their skin. Victims have flushed their heads in toilets, attacked their siblings, killed their pets, and in some extreme instances, attempted or died by suicide. Court records from the United States and European nations reveal participants in this network have also been accused of robberies, in-person sexual abuse of minors, kidnapping, weapons violations, swatting, and murder.

“Their main aim is to traumatize you,” says Anna, a young woman groomed and victimized by 764, one of the most notorious groups under the com umbrella. “They want to make you suffer. And for you to take your own life. They really are very sadistic people.”

The nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received hundreds of reports of minors extorted into hurting themselves in 2023, says NCMEC’s CyberTipline director Fallon McNulty, a sharp rise over previous years. The organization, which routes reports from social media companies and the public to law enforcement, still receives dozens each month, she says.

“From 2022 into last year, especially, the scale of what’s coming through seems like it’s continuing to grow,” McNulty says, adding that in 2022 NCMEC only saw “a handful” of such extortion reports.

These online groups, she says, are responsible for “some of the most egregious online enticement reports that we’re seeing in terms of what these children are being coerced to do.”

The FBI issued a formal warning about the broader com network in September 2023 but did not answer specific questions regarding its investigations into the com/764 extortion network.

Since mid-2021, investigators have launched criminal cases against more than a dozen people linked to com groups in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Romania, and Brazil. The US Department of Justice is pursuing further charges through federal grand jury proceedings. The com network is also connected to a nihilist Eastern European skinhead crew whose members are accused of a series of random attacks and killings in Ukraine and Russia.

US prosecutors have cited Telegram and Discord as the primary means by which members of 764 operate. The group used these platforms “to desensitize vulnerable populations through sharing extreme gore and child sexual abuse material,” prosecutors wrote in a criminal case against Kalana Limkin, an alleged 764 member charged in Hawaii with the distribution of child sexual abuse material.

“Child abuse and calls to violence are explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service,” says a Telegram spokesperson. “Telegram has moderated harmful content on our platform since its creation.” As of this writing, dozens of Telegram channels used by the extortion network remain active.

Discord says it has worked to shut down com activities on its platform for more than two years. A spokesperson for Discord, who asked not to be named for their own safety, says dismantling the group is a top priority, highlighting the company’s close working relationship with the FBI and other law enforcement. In 2023 alone, the company says, Discord blocked 130 groups and 34,000 accounts linked to 764.

Instagram accounts linked to the extortion network are still active, despite parent company Meta implementing bans on com- and 764-related accounts. SoundCloud hosted self-harm and Satanism-related playlists, which remain online as of this writing. “We strictly prohibit any content that includes or suggests child sexual abuse or grooming on our platform and uses a combination of human moderation and technological tools to identify and remove infringing content,” a SoundCloud spokesperson says.

On Roblox, user-created skins for 764-themed characters with the group’s insignia and open references to CSAM were abundantly available. Roblox spokesperson Juliet Chaitin-Lefcourt tells WIRED the company is aware of the com network, works proactively to find and ban such content, and is in constant conversation with law enforcement and other platforms. “We take the safety of our users incredibly seriously, especially given our users include young children,” she says.

Minecraft, where 764 members are known to be active, has a “variety of systems” for removing harmful content from its official servers, including “chat filtering, in-game reporting, parental controls,” and has “dedicated teams for review and moderation,” according to a spokesperson for Microsoft, which owns Minecraft’s development studio. “On private servers that are unmanaged by Minecraft, we will take action to investigate reported violations and apply enforcement mechanisms as needed.”

The network’s members, however, have shown enough technical proficiency to evade whatever measures platforms take to ban them.

The FBI and other foreign law enforcement agencies are investigating 764 for both CSAM offenses and terrorism because of a connection to Order of Nine Angles, a once-obscure Satanist cult from Great Britain that has become ever-present in online “edge lord” and militant neo-Nazi circles over the past decade. Swastikas, Nazi memes, and accelerationist propaganda glorifying homicidal members of white supremacist groups like the Atomwaffen Division frequently appear in the extortion group’s Telegram channels. While many users appear unfamiliar with O9A dogma, the sect’s symbols, texts, and aesthetic have been widely co-opted within the group for shock value. The practice of urging victims to injure themselves with “cutsigns” also bears a striking resemblance to O9A rituals.

A law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation into 764 and com, speaking on the condition of anonymity, notes that the association with com has drastically increased O9A’s visibility. “There’s a far larger pool of recruits and people interested in child abuse and pedophilia than an obscure Satanist sect,” they say. “In a way, it’s genius.”

The perpetrators of com’s and 764’s abuse have for years operated behind the masks of usernames and profile pictures. A detailed look at the leadership and core members of this community reveal for the first time crucial details about the steps leading them to systematically victimize children, how the predation network functions, how they have continued to evade ban attempts by major platforms and persist despite ongoing criminal investigations—and how they continue to spread a malicious ethos worldwide.

ACCORDING TO INTERVIEWS with victims, law enforcement sources, and court records, 764 begins with Bradley Cadenhead, a teenager from the Dallas exurb of Stephenville, Texas.

Cadenhead’s problematic behavior started early, from watching online porn at age 8 to developing a fascination with “violent torture pictures and video, as well as gore,” according to court records. Written statements from other children reveal that Cadenhead posted extensively on social media about violence.

Cadenhead was placed on juvenile probation for discussing shooting up a middle school when he was 13. The next year, he was briefly sent to a juvenile detention facility for violating terms of his parole, and routinely watched ultra-violent “gore” content online.

Probation records show Cadenhead, while under court supervision, largely refused to participate in counseling sessions, repeatedly left home without permission, assaulted his mother, and ingested dangerous amounts of Tylenol and cough syrup, requiring him to be briefly hospitalized.

Cadenhead’s online activities also went unrestricted. While playing Minecraft, he met another user who deepened his interest in “gore,” he told probation officials. Research provided by Discord’s security team indicates that Cadenhead learned to groom children on a sextortion server called “CVLT.” Cadenhead then started a Discord server called “764,” after the first three digits of Stephenville’s zip code.

Cadenhead and dozens of others would use the 764 Discord server and Telegram to distribute CSAM and seek out vulnerable children to victimize. Using the handles of “Felix” and “Brad764,” Cadenhead moderated the server, which received hundreds of videos and photographs of extreme violence, animal torture, and CSAM, some of which Cadenhead uploaded himself. “How-to” guides on sexually exploiting and extorting minors online were circulated in their channels. The server repeatedly evaded bans from Discord, which says it first identified 764 and its hundreds of users in January 2021, and reported it to law enforcement that year.

Beginning in June 2021, Discord flagged Cadenhead’s online conduct 58 times for sharing “images of prepubescent females [and] males engage[d] in sexual acts, or in various poses nude.” The complaints, referenced in court documents, included a number of Cadenhead’s Discord usernames and an Internet Protocol address located in Stephenville, Texas. According to a Discord spokesperson, Cadenhead used 58 distinct accounts in each one of the reported incidents.

A screencap from a video of 764 members transitioning from Telegram into Roblox. One wears a skin bearing the slogan “I love CP,” a direct reference to CSAM. Roblox says it bans accounts related to 764. ROBLOX VIA ALI WINSTON

Late that August, officers from Stephenville Police seized Cadenhead’s cell phone. Law enforcement would later find a cache of more than 20 files of CSAM, as well as photographs featuring “Brad is a pedo” and “764” carved into the flesh of unknown persons.

“I’ve never seen any individual get as many complaints against him as Bradley,” says Captain Jeremy Lanier of the Stephenville Police Department, who helped conduct the forensic analysis of Cadenhead’s devices. “This wasn’t run-of-the-mill child porn, this was a lot darker. There was one video of a woman being held down and stabbed. This case was awful. It was the worst stuff I’ve ever looked at in six years of working CSAM.”

Cadenhead and other members of his server would lure young women into video chats and extort them into cutting themselves, performing live sexual acts, or harming themselves. “Eve,” a teenage girl from the Midwest, was victimized in this manner prior to spring 2021 when she was a young teenager.

In an interview, Eve’s mother recounted her daughter being drawn into the exploitation network through “gore” servers on Discord, where children would watch ultra-violent content. “What 764 would do is they would go in and drop videos in these groups and try to start pulling kids out of that to their server,” she says. The moderator of the 764 server, who went by “Brad”—one of the aliases connected to Cadenhead—“groomed” her daughter through false shows of affection and convincing her to send them nude photographs of herself.

Once they established a degree of trust, Cadenhead and the extorters threatened to harm Eve’s elementary-school-aged brother or release her explicit photographs. On video calls, they would urge her to kill herself and convince her to carve their usernames into her skin. They pressured her to strangle her cat, and even to behead her pet hamster on camera. “Bite the head off, or I’ll fuck your whole life up,” a user named “Felix” told Eve on video. During the police investigation, Felix was an alias associated with an IP address linked to Cadenhead.

Eve did all this in her bedroom closet.

Things took a turn for the worse when Eve deeply cut herself one night in the bath, to “turn the water red” like one of her extorters had requested. They also swatted the family’s house and began calling her school and telling her principal she’d tried to murder animals, prompting school officials to file a report with local police.

“You just don’t realize how quickly it can happen,” Eve’s mother says.

According to her mother, the FBI did not reach out to Eve until December 2023. The Stephenville Police Department was not aware of Eve’s victimization by Cadenhead, and he was not charged with her abuse. According to Lanier, the FBI only asked him for the contents of Cadenhead’s devices in November 2023, two years after his arrest. Eve’s mother said FBI agents contacted her the following month and asked her for details about her daughter’s abuse. The agents did not say why they were inquiring about Eve’s ordeal, and she learned from this reporting consortium that her daughter’s abuser had been arrested.

The FBI would not comment in response to questions about Eve’s abuse, when the agency became aware of Cadenhead, the broader 764 network, or various perpetrators identified in this article.

An interview Cadenhead gave with probation services confirmed the general details of Eve’s story. “Bradley did admit to the group’s use of the server to do sextortion of individuals,” the report read. “They would do this for money and sometimes just for power over the individuals.” Cadenhead admitted urging users in the server to carve his initials into their bodies as a form of homage, described his server as a “cult,” and said many of the participants venerated him as a cult leader.

Last spring, Cadenhead pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Now 18 years old, he is currently incarcerated at Estelle State Prison in Huntsville, one of Texas’ highest-security correctional facilities. Cadenhead and his parents did not respond to multiple requests for comment, though a family attorney indicated they may appeal his conviction.

Now a junior in high school, Eve has spent a year in trauma therapy, which has helped. However, the scars of her ordeal are both mental and physical: The numbers 764 are visible in the traces of a cutsign on one of her thighs.

THE FBI’S INTEREST in 764 appears to have begun with a core member of Cadenhead’s server who went by “Duck” or “Gorebutcher.” Victims described him as aggressive, sadistic, and cliquish, refusing to interact with underage girls he deemed unattractive and running an invite-only chat dedicated to the Order of Nine Angles. “He didn’t like me because I wasn’t pretty enough. He made that very clear,” says “Sophia,” a young Canadian woman victimized by 764 for years.

Gorebutcher allegedly is Angel Luis Almeida, a high school dropout from Ocala, Florida, with a violent past and a long rap sheet. By 19, Almeida had racked up several arrests in the central Florida town, accused of car theft, domestic assault, vehicle burglaries, and armed robberies. He served time in 2019 for stealing several cars.

At some point after his release in March 2020, Almeida moved to a relative’s apartment in Queens, New York. His social media posts on Instagram and Facebook from that era show a young man enamored with firearms, drugs, threats of violence, the Order of Nine Angles, and child abuse. In several posts, he poses shirtless with a friend while toting a shotgun, wears a skull mask balaclava associated with murderous neo-Nazi groups, and brandishes a handgun at the camera while smoking what appears to be narcotics from a glass pipe.

In late February 2021, according to court records, Almeida posted a photograph of a bound, gagged, and half-dressed young girl with the caption: “Life’s always been shit still I see the past through rose colored lenses.”

Almeida’s online activity grew alarming enough that a warning about his conduct made its way to the FBI by September 2021, according to FBI records. A tipster warned the Bureau that Almeida had allegedly posted pictures of children in bondage wear, threatened to kill other users, had met up with a 16-year-old in person, and was potentially targeting other minors sexually.

In October 2021, as 764’s notoriety online grew following Cadenhead’s arrest, the FBI received another tip about Almeida’s prior criminal conduct and alleged possession of firearms: “He consistently posts animal abuse material and has even posted images of himself having abused an animal by chopping it in half. He is extremely dangerous. He openly admits what he wants to do to children, posts his drug use online, and even posts child abuse material.”

That fall, the Feds allege, Almeida posted images on Instagram of himself posing with a handgun next to a flag of Tempel ov Blood—an American offshoot of O9A run by longtime FBI informant Joshua Caleb Sutter—and a photo of himself in front of a Nazi flag and a computer screen reading, “I’m addicted to hardcore child pornography,” while wearing a shirt emblazoned with “kiddie fiddler.” Telegram posts recovered by an FBI employee showed Almeida posing with a handgun and more O9A indicia, including a flag, and a book, The Sinister Tradition.

Almeida’s apparent possession of a firearm was enough to substantiate initial federal criminal charges against him, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took him into custody following a November 2021 raid on the Queens apartment. A 9-mm handgun, ammunition, the skull mask balaclava, four electronic devices, and an Order of Nine Angles “blood pact” were seized from Almeida’s room. Investigators say his devices held hundreds of thousands of digital files, including reams of CSAM and communications with other members of 764. This is the first public documentation of the FBI’s glimpse into the child abuse network Cadenhead had founded, despite Discord’s report about the group to the Bureau in 2021.

Digital forensics of Almeida’s online traces show he groomed “multiple minor victims, from whom he solicited CSAM and whom he encouraged to engage in sexual acts,” according to an October 2023 court filing to substantiate superseding charges of child abuse, coercion and CSAM possession.

The Feds allege that, using Facebook and Instagram, Almeida groomed an underage girl between July and December 2021, sending her explicit images of himself and convincing her to produce and send CSAM of herself. His digital traces, the Feds claim, also show Almeida grooming another minor from February 2020 through November 2021 over “cellphone messages” and in person. He allegedly convinced this second girl to produce CSAM of herself, engage in sexual acts with him, and worse: “The defendant held Jane Doe-2 at gunpoint while posing for a photograph, and he convinced Jane Doe-2 to cut her neck to allow the defendant to drink her blood. The defendant instructed Jane Doe-2 to study 764 doctrine and to distribute CSAM to others.”

According to a Meta representative, the company began investigating com and 764 in early 2023 and has since banned the group and its various splinters from its platforms, but describes these efforts as an “ongoing fight.” Almeida’s accounts were disabled in 2021, and his data was turned over to law enforcement pursuant to a court order, says the Meta spokesperson.

“Child exploitation is a horrific crime, and we’ve spent years building technology to combat it and to support law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting the criminals behind it,” the spokesperson says. “We’ve banned these groups from our apps, and continue to proactively work to find and remove their accounts.”

Almeida faces life in prison if convicted. He has been held in federal jails since his arrest in fall 2021.

AMID THE INVESTIGATIONS against Cadenhead and Almeida, a new era of 764 began to emerge. One particularly violent member of 764’s “New Generation” was “Tobbz,” a young German based in Romania, who joined 764 when Cadenhead still ran the server. After Cadenhead’s arrest, according to victims and court documents, the group was run by a Romanian national who went by the handle “Riley,” whose true name is Francesco.

Sophia, who was pulled into 764’s orbit around the age of 15 from servers that were initially oriented toward hackers and sim swappers, says that Tobbz was popular among the core 764 members, particularly Cadenhead.

“He’s a little psychopath,” Sophia says of Tobbz. “He used to take dogs from the pound and beat them to death.”

Born in western Germany and raised by a foster family in Romania, Tobbz eventually fell into 764’s world, joined the group, daubed the group’s name on the wall of his room, and inked it on his forearm. Tobbz also developed an intense interest in the Order of Nine Angles, downloading O9A propaganda and tattooing himself with the Satanist cult’s septagram symbol.

In March 2022, Tobbz attacked an 82-year-old man, causing severe injuries that hospitalized the victim for a fortnight. Two weeks later, he fatally stabbed an elderly woman he suspected of Roma or Jewish ancestry, streaming the lethal knife attack on Discord and later uploading the video to Telegram. After the murder, Tobbz posted: “I feel like God.”

When Tobbz was arrested in April 2022, investigators uncovered CSAM material, and “a lot of material with violence in every imaginable form, beheadings, bombings, abused children,” according to court records. He was convicted of aggravated murder in August 2023 for killing the elderly woman and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Riley was far more charismatic than Tobbz. Sophia, his longtime victim who spent a few years in the group’s clutches, describes Riley as charismatic, fluent in English, and hyperactive in growing 764 after Cadenhead’s arrest.

Accounts branded with 764 were prevalent on Instagram, where users posted graphic images. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, says has banned 764-related accounts that violate its rules. INSTAGRAM VIA ALI WINSTON

“Riley gets more girls because he’s more attractive,” she says. Riley would encourage 764 participants to generate content from their victims. “Fansigns and stuff, like people stepping on birds, crushing them, and people killing animals. Really. He would post a lot of animal killing,” Sophia alleges. Riley was also enamored with the Order of Nine Angles and the Tempel ov Blood. Riley tattooed the Tempel ov Blood insignia, a trident topped with “333,” on his forearm, the same insignia Angel Almeida displayed on a flag in his bedroom.

According to child services records and police reports, Sophia had been sexually abused by her uncle before she reached elementary school, and had a history of mental health problems and substance abuse. Several 764 members would talk to Sophia about carving their handles into her skin, over and over again. She was also coerced to cut a Swastika into her skin. They would fat-shame her constantly in chats; she developed an eating disorder and shed 60 pounds. She says she was present in the server for some of the group’s most notorious moments, including the livestream where more than a dozen watched Eve behead her hamster.

Sophia also witnessed people seriously harm themselves in “red room” livestreams, which were normally carried out on dark-web sites and shared in 764 chats. The experiences were traumatic. “I watched a girl hang herself from her closet,” Sophia says, adding that the girl survived. “I saw somebody shoot themselves. Right in the face.”

Discord says it is assisting law enforcement in its investigation into the suicide.

Victims who provided CSAM and self-harm videos were rewarded with attention and praise from the extortion group. In turn, the members who are able to coerce more material from their victims gain status within the group. “The more content they provide, the higher they are in their hierarchy,” says Anna, a young Western European woman who was groomed by 764.

Whenever she resisted his requests to produce “content,” Riley would threaten to send her prior images of self-harm to her parents. Like Anna, other victims who didn’t comply with the group’s demands were derided, mocked, threatened, and extorted.

“I was a prize. You know, that’s what the girls are,” says Sophia. “They are prizes. They’re little show ponies. And eventually, they turned on me and everything went to shit. And I tried to kill myself and severely mutilated myself.” She bears the physical and mental scars to this day.

Riley was charged with possession and distribution of CSAM in the summer of 2023. He was convicted in June 2023 and sentenced to three years in prison.

The abuse was systematic, and even codified in writing. A user with the alias “Convict” circulated a how-to guide to grooming potential victims that identifies minors with mental disorders and illnesses as the most susceptible to manipulation. The detailed instructions document how to feign affection and draw victims into influence, then turn that attention into negative enforcement and sow self-doubt in order to bring that person to the edge of a “border-line episode.” The guide reads, “When they hit an episode, continue to break them down until they seem defeated.”

Sophia was also victimized by 764 member Kierre Anthony Cutler, a young man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who went by the handle “MK Ultra” in 764. Sophia says that Cutler would routinely represent Nazi imagery despite being Black, mainly for shock value. “I think it was more the power that it stood behind and not so much the actual racism and white supremacy,” Sophia says.

Sophia says Cutler’s behavior followed the 764 grooming manual to the letter. Cutler would routinely “love-bomb” Sophia and other girls in 764’s orbit with affection to build a rapport, and then turn on them with abuse and sadistic demands. Videos show that Culter forced one of his victims to eat her father’s ashes on video chat, and another to cut her thighs and write his username on the floor in her blood.

Cutler’s conduct was brought to the attention of the FBI in October 2022, when Discord alerted the NCMEC that an account had uploaded suspected CSAM to that platform. Detectives from the Winston-Salem Police Department traced the account back to Cutler, who, according to a court filing was previously investigated for CSAM distribution. The cops located Cutler outside a local homeless shelter, arrested him, and seized his devices. Cutler admitted to downloading CSAM materials and going by the username MK Ultra.

Forensic reviews of Cutler’s phone turned up “countless images of graphic self-mutilation by unknown persons, images and videos of animal torture, images and videos of unknown persons committing suicide, some of whom were juveniles,” including imagery of cutsigns featuring Cutler’s handles, reads a statement of facts filed by federal prosecutors in his criminal case.

Detective Abraham Basco did the analysis of Cutler’s phone, turning up “700 images of the worst child exploitation he has observed in his career,” according to court records. “Nearly every image of child sexual exploitation showed the child to be bound or restrained and in many cases an element of sadism was observed.”

Cutler was charged with federal CSAM-related offenses last summer. He has pleaded guilty and is set for sentencing on March 20.

BY 2022, THE FBI’s investigation into 764 and com had significantly widened from Angel Almeida’s original case to suspects in the United States and beyond. At the 2022 Europol conference that fall, an FBI team gave a presentation to European law enforcement agencies that kick-started criminal investigations in Germany and France. Interpol was also brought in to help coordinate casework.

Criminal prosecutions of 764 and com members increased significantly in 2023, with cases filed in the United Kingdom, Germany, and several US jurisdictions. However, 764 and com have persisted, reemerging and splintering into dozens of new Discord servers and Telegram group chats that frequently change identifying information to stay ahead of the platforms and law enforcement.

Thomas-Gabriel Rüdiger, head of the Institute for Cyber Criminology at the Brandenburg Police University, assumes that most offenders feel safe online. “Particularly in a global context, the pressure by law enforcement on the internet can only be considered very low,” he says. This remains true, he says, “even if individual groups are repeatedly taken down.”

Recent cases brought by the FBI against US-based members of com illuminate the sheer volume of servers and groups that comprise the network’s “New Gen.” In December, a Hawaii Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Kalana Limkin and charged him with CSAM distribution and soliciting minors through the Cultist Discord server. Court records show several reports were filed against Limkin for uploads of CSAM featuring the abuse of infants.

In late January, FBI agents arrested 47-year-old Richard Densmore at his grandmother’s house in Kaleva, Michigan. An Army veteran who’d committed a sexual offense in 1997, Densmore allegedly went by the handle “Rabid” online, took part in “New Gen” com/764 circles, and ran his own Discord server called “Sewer,” where he would allegedly solicit and distribute CSAM of young girls. During a detention hearing for Densmore, federal prosecutors highlighted his affiliation with 764, which they labeled “an emerging threat.”

Most recently, federal law enforcement arrested 24-year-old Kyle Spitze of Friendsville, Tennessee, on child sexual exploitation charges. Federal agents seized Spitze’s phone in mid-February following a series of chaotic events during which his mother’s boyfriend shot him in the ear, and culminating in his mother’s death in late January. On Spitze’s phone, according to court records, federal agents found CSAM of a minor victim under a folder labeled with her name, and a Telegram account under the username “Criminal,” which Spitze allegedly used to distribute the young girl’s CSAM to other users. The victim was also identified and interviewed by the FBI, and stated that she was 12 years old when Spitze allegedly victimized her.

Chloe, one of his ex-girlfriends who met Spitze as an adult, says she found out about his alleged pedophilia after they broke up. “He was already making me upset during our relationship by posting revenge [porn] of me, and selling those images behind my back,” she says. Since she broke up with him last summer, Chloe learned through Spitze’s online presence that he allegedly abused several other children, many of whom she’d spoken to, with ages ranging from 17 to 10 years old. “He ran this server on Discord and Telegram, Slitbunnies. It was full of CSAM, cutsigns, and animal crush,” Chloe claims.

Several of Spitze’s Telegram channels are mentioned in court records as featuring in a “Hype video” from the com/764 network that depicts deep lacerations and degrading acts by at least a dozen young women, almost all of whom bear fansigns or cutsigns from Spitze or other people in the network.

Spitze is currently detained in a county jail in Kentucky. He has not yet entered a plea, and his lawyer declined a request to comment.

SINCE ANGEL ALMEIDA’S November 2021 arrest, he has tattooed an Order of Nine Angles septagram onto his chest, hurled racist and antisemitic invective at the presiding judge in his case, and twice lashed out in court appearances last year, attempting to attack both a DOJ employee in the audience during a June hearing and his own defense attorney at a proceeding last fall.

Even as the ex-convict stares down a potential life sentence in federal prison, com continues to proliferate online and seek out new victims, with “Free Duck” messages and stickers of Almeida’s photo still prevalent in the network’s Telegram channels. As of this writing, com accounts and channels were still visible on Instagram, X, Roblox, SoundCloud, and Telegram.

At the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Almeida managed to obtain access to a contraband phone and posted a bare chested self-portrait while branding a homemade shank and bludgeon in each hand. Several weeks ago, he was relocated to a federal jail in Chicago, where he underwent a psychiatric evaluation to determine if he is fit to stand trial. The Federal Bureau of Prison’s inmate locator shows him back in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center as of this writing.

In court, Almeida has repeatedly referred to himself as a “God” and a “beast” while claiming “the spirits are on my side” in his legal battle against the government, for which he faces a possible life sentence. At every appearance, he is typically escorted in by three US marshals with shackles on his hands and feet.

Nevertheless, he exudes an air of permanent menace. After one hearing last year, while being frog-marched out of the court by two massive marshals, he glared around the courtroom and yelled: “When I get out of here, Ima kill all of y’all! I’m gonna come after your fucking kids.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

Additional reporting by Dhruv Mehrotra and Matt Burgess.

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