764 Network

764 is a decentralized, transnational network of online groups that engages in the sexual exploitation of minors, production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), sextortion, coerced self-harm, and the glorification and incitement of real-world violence. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) classifies 764 and its affiliated groups under the umbrella term "Nihilistic Violent Extremists" (NVEs), defined as individuals who engage in criminal conduct in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals rooted in a hatred of society and a desire to bring about its collapse through chaos and destruction.¹ As of early 2026, the FBI was conducting more than 350 active investigations tied to 764 and similar networks, with DOJ career officials describing it as "as serious a threat as you can imagine."²

Origins: CVLT and the Minecraft Server

The immediate precursor to 764 was CVLT, a Discord-based child exploitation network founded in 2019 by Rohan Rane, a 23-year-old Indian national attending business school in Antibes, France. Rane built CVLT into a several-hundred-member community in which he lured underage girls from around the world, obtained compromising photographs, and blackmailed victims into escalating self-harm and suicidal acts, all broadcast live over webcam. Rane was arrested in France in 2021.³

The connection between CVLT and 764 runs through a single individual: Bradley Chance Cadenhead, a 15-year-old school dropout in Texas who encountered a CVLT member in a Minecraft server and absorbed its methods. Cadenhead, operating under the alias "Felix," founded 764 in 2020-2021 and named the group after his local zip code.⁴ He was arrested in August 2021 after investigators traced a CSAM upload on Discord to his mother's apartment, convicted in Texas state court on nine counts of child pornography possession, and sentenced on May 16, 2023 to 80 years in state prison.⁵

764's founding and early spread coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which drove vulnerable adolescents deeper into online spaces and created conditions the network exploited for recruitment.

Ideology: Nihilism, Accelerationism, and O9A Aesthetics

764's ideology carries no coherent political program and affiliates with no single tradition, but it operates within a recognizable environment. At its core, 764 embraces destruction and chaos as ends in themselves, drawing on the accelerationism current that holds existing social structures must be violently destabilized before any new order can emerge. According to DOJ prosecutors, 764's stated goal is societal collapse and the establishment of a "survival of the fittest" model.²

764 draws heavily on the visual aesthetics and some conceptual apparatus of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), the British occultist neo-Nazi organization. O9A's doctrine of Insight Roles (in which initiates are required to commit real crimes as a form of spiritual development) maps directly onto 764's content-creation economy, in which members must produce evidence of criminal acts to advance in rank. O9A's published texts, particularly Iron Gates (published 2014 by Tempel ov Blood through Martinet Press), which depicts post-apocalyptic violence including child murder and cannibalism framed as spiritual instruction, circulated through Terrorgram channels and directly influenced 764's operational environment.⁶ The connection is primarily aesthetic and structural: 764 is not an O9A nexion, and its members do not generally claim O9A affiliation, but both networks share a radicalization pipeline, overlapping personnel, and a common logic of transgression-as-initiation.

Structure: Hierarchy and Content Economy

764 operates through a nested, cell-based hierarchy that combines operational compartmentalization with a content-production economy. Advancement through the ranks requires documented criminal output:

• Cell Owner: ultimate strategic authority over a given cell
• Council Members: decision-makers on recruitment, promotions, and internal disputes
• Veterans: proven members with substantial histories of producing violent or exploitative content
• Recruits: new members working toward veteran status
• Inner Cells: elite, highly restricted subgroups requiring demonstrated commitment at the veteran level

Internal communications obtained by researchers reveal explicit content quotas. Members seeking advancement were expected to document grooming of minors for self-harm, arson, "brickings" (throwing bricks; three required for advancement), graffiti (five required), and animal cruelty. Animal abuse was characterized within the network as "one of the lowest and easiest transgressive barriers of entry a minor will carry out."⁷ A member identified in court documents as a 764 leader told recruits: "after producing content you'll grow up the ranks, once you hit veteran you'll be invited to the inferno," referring to 764 Inferno, the most restricted inner cell and the subject of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia RICO case against Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal.⁸

Operational security within 764 is deliberate: members rotate identities, maintain multiple aliases, use deleted and "ghost" accounts, and create fake "dupe" cells to mislead law enforcement. Cross-cell membership provides resilience against takedowns.⁷

Platforms and Recruitment Infrastructure

764 operates primarily across Discord, Telegram, Roblox, and various rotating platforms. Recruiters target online spaces frequented by vulnerable minors, including LGBTQ+ youth, teenagers struggling with mental health issues, and individuals in grief or crisis. The grooming process employs "love bombing" (overwhelming a target with affection and acceptance before obtaining compromising material), followed by escalating blackmail once CSAM is secured.¹

The network circulated multiple operational guides: a "Sextortion Handbook" specifying grooming and blackmail techniques, a "Suicide Guide," and a "Dox Guide" for threatening and locating victims. Baron Cain Martin ("Convict"), the Arizona leader subsequently charged with federal terrorism offenses, wrote and distributed a detailed grooming guide advising 764 members to prioritize victims already struggling with mental health, on the grounds that vulnerability is the primary targeting criterion.⁹

Splinter Groups and Network Evolution

After Cadenhead's 2021 arrest and the disruption of 764's original leadership, the network fractured into successor and affiliated groups that researchers and DOJ prosecutors collectively call "The Com" (short for "the community"). These splinter organizations maintain 764's aesthetic, tactics, and content economy under distinct names. Documented successor groups include Harm Nation, CVLTIST, Court, Kaskar, Leak Society, H3ll, 6996, 7997, and Slit Town. Despite operating under separate banners, these groups are considered continuous with 764 due to shared personnel, visual aesthetics, and involvement in child sexual exploitation and online harassment.¹

Federal Prosecutions

The United States government had charged at least 37 people with ties to 764 or affiliated networks as of mid-2026, with more than 350 FBI investigations ongoing.² The most significant cases include:

Baron Cain Martin ("Convict"), 21, of Tucson, Arizona: A 29-count superseding indictment returned in the District of Arizona in October 2025 charged Martin with participating in a child exploitation enterprise, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists (the first such charge applied to a 764 member), conspiring to kill or maim persons in a foreign country, five counts of producing CSAM, eleven counts of distributing CSAM, three counts of coercing minors into sexual activity, three counts of cyberstalking, animal crushing, and wire fraud conspiracy. Martin was arrested December 11, 2024 and has been in federal custody since. He allegedly victimized at least nine people, eight of them minors between the ages of 11 and 15. Attorney General Pamela Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel both addressed the case at announcement.⁹

Leonidas Varagiannis ("War"), 21, a U.S. citizen residing in Thessaloniki, Greece, and Prasan Nepal ("Trippy"), 20, of North Carolina: Charged in the District of Columbia with operating the "764 Inferno" inner cell as a global child exploitation enterprise. Varagiannis was arrested in Greece in April 2025; Nepal was arrested in North Carolina on April 22, 2025. Nepal had been involved with 764 since late 2020, near the network's inception; Varagiannis joined in late 2023. The alleged conspiracy included coercing victims to cut 764 members' names into their bodies, self-immolation, animal abuse, sexual exploitation of siblings, and threats of murder. Victims were as young as 13.⁸

Tony Christopher Long ("Inactive," "Inactivee0," "inactivecvx"), 19, of Porterville, California: A six-count indictment in the Eastern District of California charged Long with animal crushing (two counts), sexual exploitation of a minor, possession of CSAM, cyberstalking, and interstate threats. Long faces a maximum of 69 years in prison and was in state custody on related charges at the time of the federal indictment.¹⁰

Additional cases: A former U.S. Navy petty officer and four others were charged in December 2025 with founding an online extortion group that prosecutors said helped spawn 764. As of April 2026, Project Compass, an operation coordinated by Europol with participation from 28 countries including all Five Eyes members, had resulted in the arrest of 30 perpetrators, the partial or full identification of 179 suspects, and the rescue of four victims.¹¹

Scale of Harm and DOJ Threat Assessment

In the first nine months of 2025, law enforcement received more than 2,000 abuse reports tied to 764, double the rate of the prior year.² Victims have ranged in age from as young as nine years old.

DOJ Trial Attorney Justin Sher (National Security Division) described 764's content as so extreme that "I don't think Stephen King is dark enough to come up with some of the stuff," noting that members use violent and exploitative content as internal currency to build status.² DOJ Domestic Terrorism Coordinator James Donnelly characterized the threat as "as serious a threat as you can imagine" and warned that members were "trying to metastasize the evil."² DOJ's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section chief Steve Grocki noted in rare public comments that current law makes self-harm coercion cases difficult to prosecute and that the government has had to employ creative applications of existing statutes.²

Documented Attacks and Violence Attribution

As of May 2026, the most direct connection between the 764 ecosystem and lethal real-world violence came through the accelerationist ideological pipeline 764 shares with groups like Atomwaffen Division and Terrorgram Collective, rather than through a confirmed 764 member committing a mass casualty attack. The two perpetrators of the 2026 Islamic Center of San Diego Shooting, Cain Clark (17) and Caleb Vazquez (18), cited Atomwaffen Division and Terrorgram in their manifestos but had no confirmed direct 764 affiliation. Europe-based groups in the 764 network have been linked to at least three stabbing sprees. The DOJ's terrorism charge against Baron Cain Martin (based on a conspiracy to direct a foreign victim to self-harm and self-kill) represents the first formal legal recognition that 764's coercive violence constitutes terrorism.⁹