Credit: Jazmin Tabuena/corelens via Canva; Illustration by Hazel Woodrow
This report includes descriptions of self-harm, suicide, animal mutilation, and child sexual abuse.
In recent years, a dark digital subculture has been metastasizing online and growing into a significant threat to young people, who are being targeted and exploited by an evolving network of online and offline criminals.
Com is a threat network that has developed online among a series of disparate and decentralized individuals operating on numerous continents and engaged in hacking, fraud, extortion, the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), murder, and alleged terrorist plots.
Rather than a group or even an ideological movement, this network is an interconnected series of chat servers, websites, and people that come together to boast and collaborate on their illegal actions.
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Grown from several existing subcultures, including the violent militant accelerationist ecosystem, the most notorious group to come from the Com is 764. Started by an American teenager, 764 is one node in a web of different Com groups focused on sexually extorting typically young girls and women to commit an increasingly degrading series of actions that includes finding and abusing new young people on their behalf, self-harm, and even coached suicide.
The “764 network,” as the broader Com subset of sexual extortion groups have begun being called, has become so prolific that it has been mentioned in numerous press releases and warnings by federal and local law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions, including cases in Canada.
Using a framework developed by researcher Marc-André Argentino, Com’s criminal actions can be subdivided into three pillars. The first, “Cyber Com,” encompasses the network’s cybercriminal activities which include ransomware targeting, hacking and intrusions, prolific swatting campaigns, and cryptocurrency theft. The second pillar is the aforementioned 764 network or “Sextortion Com,” which captures the parts of the network dedicated to the sexual extortion of children. Finally, there is “Offline Com” which focuses on inciting people to commit real world violence ranging from vandalism and property damage to acts of terrorism.
In this report, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network examines the Com network’s origins and methods, highlighting the recent criminal cases in Canada, as well as internationally, and describes the threat that the Com network poses.