Pyramid of pain

WHAT is the common thread in all these cases?

In 2026, a 14-year-old girl in Pakistan tortures and kills her pet cat, sending the pictures of the abuse to an unknown person for approval. In late 2024 in Stockholm, a 14-year-old boy walks up to a man in his 80s, stabs him repeatedly in the back and flees, taking nothing from his victim except blood. Another teenager in the same country tries to coerce a 13-year-old to take his own life and video-stream his suicide. In the US state of Oregon, a 16-year-old shoots and kills three students and a teacher at an elementary school before being shot dead. A year earlier, in the same state, a 14-year-old was arrested for planning a mass shooting/ suicide at a mall. In June 2026, a school shooting takes place in the Philippines where two suspects, aged 14 and 15, killed three students and wounded 20 others.

In all these cases, the driving force for this kind of torture, self-harm, murder, and suicide is a shadowy online group called 764 that is dedicated to the ‘gamification’ of violence, in which your online status rises in proportion to the harm you can do — to yourself or, preferably, to others.

764 takes its name from the first three digits of the zip code for Stephenville, Texas, the home of its founder Bradley Cadenhead, known online as Felix, who created this group in 2021 when he was 15. While he is now serving 80 years in a US prison after being convicted of possessing child sexual abuse material, his network not only survives, but is considered a tier-1 security threat in the US, alongside the likes of Al Qaeda and IS, and — as evidence of its transnational reach and decentralised nature — is also listed as a terrorist group in New Zealand and Canada, to name just two.

But what sets 764 apart from ‘mainstream’ terrorist groups is its ideology, or lack thereof. There’s no political agenda, barring perhaps a shared hatred for humanity, a desire to dismantle morality as a whole, and to accelerate, as some of its adherents put it, the destruction of society. Defined by the FBI as “violent nihilistic extremism”, it promotes harm for the sake of harm; they are the engagement farmers of evil.

The hunt for victims begins on social media pages frequented by young people or the chat servers of otherwise perfectly innocent games like Minecraft and Roblox, and then shifts onto Discord servers or Telegram. With a predator’s instinct, they target the young, the vulnerable, and as forensic psychologist Joni Johnston puts it, the “sad and the strange”.

Once suitable targets are identified, a well-thought-out process of psychological manipulation, extortion, and coercion begins in which victims often turn into perpetrators who can then rise in the ranks depending on how many others they can coerce or blackmail into committing atrocities.

The 764 group and the larger networks it is affiliated with even publish grooming and blackmail guides and digital scrapbooks (‘lorebooks’ in their parlance) of their exploits, not only gaining them further clout and respect in their twisted system of merit but also serving as ‘how-to’ guides for new recruits.

They are the engagement farmers of evil.

The initial approach is cloaked in kindness; from there, it often turns into romantic overtures intended to gain the victim’s trust. Once compromising pictures of and personal information on the victim are obtained, they are used to blackmail the victims into acts like progressively harming themselves, their pets, or other human beings. Typical ‘tasks’ and ‘challenges’ entail cutting the 764 logo into one’s arm or writing the online nickname of one’s ‘controller’ in blood and then sending photographic evidence to the group. The deeper they get, the more they are threatened with exposure by the 764 group.

Once control has been established, the victims are made to victimise others and commit serious crimes, much like a pyramid scheme of pain.

In the US alone, 764 has been linked to at least five mass shootings. Its founder didn’t invent the grooming method he and his followers use; he borrowed it from already existing groups like CVLT and Greggy’s Cult, which specialised in coercing children to expose themselves sexually or harm themselves. Cadenhead had come across these groups when he was 10 and was sent real footage of people being tortured while on a Minecraft server.

764 is only one part of a much larger network known as ‘The Com’ which is short for ‘Community’, and shares this status with other accelerationist, neo-Nazi, and openly satanic sub-groups such as No Lives Matter, Satanic Front, and Maniacs Murder Club.

In one sense, the rise of such groups is a sign of the depths to which society has sunk, where traditional morality is to be mocked and self-gratification is the greatest good. And in these murky deeps, there are sharks.

The writer is a journalist.

X: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, November 2nd, 2026