Rohan Rane

Rohan Rane (full legal name Rohan Sandeep Rane, born 1996) is an Indian national who, while attending a top business school in Antibes, France, founded CVLT in 2019 at approximately 23 years of age. CVLT was the Discord-based child exploitation network that developed the sextortion-to-self-harm coercion model subsequently transmitted to the 764 network through a single encounter in a Minecraft server between a CVLT member and 764 founder Bradley Chance Cadenhead. Rane was arrested in France on April 6, 2021, and in February 2025 was charged by U.S. prosecutors in United States v. Rane et al., 2:25-cr-00040 (C.D. Cal.), with engaging in a child exploitation enterprise. As of May 2026 he remains in French custody pending extradition to the United States.¹

CVLT and Its Methods

Rane founded CVLT in 2019 as a community initially numbering a few hundred members, centered on Discord. CVLT espoused neo-Nazism, nihilism, and pedophilia as its core principles. Rane recruited underage girls from around the world into the community through social engineering, obtained compromising sexual photographs and videos from them, and used that material as leverage to compel victims into escalating acts of self-harm up to and including suicidal behavior. The acts were recorded on webcam and broadcast live within the CVLT server. DOJ press releases document specific coercion acts: compelling victims to cut themselves, drink their own urine, punch themselves, use racial slurs against themselves, carve CVLT members' names into their skin with razor blades, and at the terminal extreme, kill themselves on a live video stream.²

CVLT operated from at least 2019 to 2022. The network targeted particularly vulnerable girls, including those with mental health histories or prior abuse, and exposed them first to extremist and violent content before beginning direct coercion. The core mechanism CVLT established, which 764 replicated, was the use of initially consensual intimate imagery as a blackmail lever to compel victims into acts they would not otherwise perform, with coercion escalating until victims escaped or were pushed to self-harm or death.²

French Investigation and Arrest

An FBI agent investigating a 15-year-old American girl who had attempted suicide under coercion in spring 2020 passed findings to French authorities. The OCRVP (Office Central pour la Répression des Violences aux Personnes, a French national police unit) initiated a judicial investigation on October 6, 2020. Rane was arrested on April 6, 2021. In France he was charged with "acts of torture and barbarity," "corruption of minors in an organized gang," and "extortion in an organized gang," and has been held in French custody since 2022, reportedly in solitary confinement while awaiting trial.³

United States Federal Case

A federal grand jury in the Central District of California returned an indictment on January 17, 2025 in United States v. Rane et al., 2:25-cr-00040, charging Rane alongside Kaleb Merritt, Clint Borge, and Collin Walker with one count of engaging in a child exploitation enterprise under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(g). The indictment was unsealed approximately February 4-5, 2025. The statute requires proof of underlying felony violations against children, a pattern of three or more separate incidents, more than one victim, and commission of the offenses in concert with three or more other persons. The four named defendants and two unnamed minor co-conspirators (one also described as a victim) together constituted the enterprise.⁴

The enterprise charged covered conduct from at least 2019 to 2022. Rane, Walker, and Merritt were charged as leaders and administrators who hosted and ran CVLT servers and controlled membership. The indictment alleged at least 16 minor victims worldwide, with at least two in Southern California.⁴

As of May 2026, Rane has not entered a U.S. plea. His extradition from France is pending. The sentence exposure upon conviction is a mandatory minimum of 20 years and a maximum of life imprisonment.⁴