764 — full name “Full Nihilist Ring of Monsters” — crystallized around 2021, but its roots stretch back to the early 2000s image-board scene. Think 8chan normalizing self-harm livestreams, then the 2018–2020 “cvlt 764” predecessor already pushing kids into animal cruelty and CSAM production.
Today it runs on Discord servers, Roblox chats, Telegram groups, and Minecraft worlds. The playbook is brutally simple:
Target vulnerable kids (9–17, often with mental-health struggles or LGBTQ+ identities).
Build quick trust — friendship, romance, whatever works.
Get nudes or compromising photos.
Flip to blackmail and force escalating “challenges”: cut the abuser’s name into your arm, stab yourself, burn yourself, extreme weight loss, behead pets, make animals kill each other, sexual acts, sibling exploitation.
Stream it live for watch parties. The worse the victim goes, the higher the predator climbs on the internal leaderboard.
Victims as young as 9 have been documented. The FBI estimates thousands affected, though the decentralized nature and victim silence make exact numbers impossible.
Just weeks ago the Justice Department charged 21-year-old Baron Martin in Arizona with 29 felonies, including conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. He allegedly ran a brutal 764 branch and even wrote a grooming/extortion guide.
Authorities now treat 764 as both a national-security threat and a direct family crisis. They’re even looking at possible links to nihilistic accelerationism in incidents like the Nashville-area school shooting.
Why parents miss it: grooming starts subtle and friendly, then snaps into coercion within weeks. Kids hide everything out of shame and fear of leaks. Most assume parental controls are enough. They’re not.
Bottom line in 2026: handing an unrestricted smartphone to anyone under 18 isn’t “modern parenting.” It’s digital neglect with lethal consequences.
The data predicted this exact escalation once encrypted apps and easy video sharing matured. We’re living in the future the patents warned us about — and it’s happening inside normal homes right now.
Stay vigilant.
