Crypto News: Bw Reads: Cyberbullying as blood sport

Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Margi Murphy writes about a global group of online sadists known as 764 that’s pushing kids to harm themselves, their pets and their families. The FBI calls it a new wave of terrorism. You can find the whole story online (free) here. You can also listen to it here.

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Sam was 15 when a friend he’d met playing Call of Duty invited him to join a private Discord forum where girls his age were sharing nude selfies and teens were trading violent images better than any horror movie. To get in, Sam needed to prove he could find someone to carve his username on their body. His friend said he had a girl who could help. Once inside, Sam says, he discovered hundreds of girls, many of them being manipulated into posting graphic clips.

Soon he was invited to join a Telegram group called 764. This secret club had more girls and gory photos showing teenagers harming pets, siblings or themselves. Sam, which isn’t his real name, agreed to talk on the condition that neither he nor his parents nor his school be identified. A teenager from St. Louis, he has plenty to say about what happened in those groups and about the life of a kid who spent too much time online.

Like everyone else in 764, Sam hid his identity. He says he was excited by the mixture of flirtatious chat, taboo humor and selfies of girls harming themselves. He began e-dating as many as 40 of them at a time. Rather than talk to his classmates, he’d chat on the forum while at school, and again when he got home. Sam’s home life was in flux. His father, Justin, had met his soon-to-be new wife, Laura. Sam wasn’t used to sharing. “I had a lot of anger,” he says. “When I was in there, I felt better, because I got attention from people.”

One evening last August, two FBI agents showed up at Sam’s house. They told Justin and Laura (also not their real names) that Sam, then 16, was manipulating girls into carving his username into their skin, writing it in blood on their walls and inciting violence online. The agents said they’d been tracking the Discord group as part of a wider investigation into a loose network of thousands of young people around the world. The agents recommended an intervention, Laura recalls, “a sort of ‘try to fix it before it is too late’ kind of thing.”

An image posted by a member of a violent cyberbullying group. Photographer: Whitney Curtis for Bloomberg Businessweek — An image posted by a member of a violent cyberbullying group.

Justin and Laura took Sam’s phone, confiscated his other devices and sent him to a facility that offered addiction and mental illness support. That seemed to work for a while. Sam went back to school and got a new phone. But by mid-October, another agent was at their door. The FBI had been tracking Sam’s usernames, the agent said, and he was still active on Discord and Telegram.

Sam had long been obsessed with gaming. Justin had even encouraged it, recalling handing his son a controller when he was a toddler. It wasn’t unusual for Sam to come home from school and disappear into his bedroom. But Justin and Laura say they never could have fathomed the world he was now involved in and were shocked to learn it was part of an international phenomenon.

Laura began locking her bedroom door at night, scared of her stepson. Justin was crushed. “It tore me up knowing that he was looking at this stuff in his room and I had no freaking idea,” he says. “Why didn’t I see something?”

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