The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued a warning about a newly discovered pedophilic, Satanist extortion cult targeting children online.
The cult uses platforms including Roblox, Discord, Twitch, Soundcloud, and Telegram to find new victims.
The FBI said in their public notice that the cult uses many names, including 676, 764, CVLT, Court, Kaskar, Harm Nation, Leak Society, and H3ll, but “continuously evolve and form subgroups under different monikers.”
“To gain access to a majority of these groups, prospective members are required to live-stream or upload videos depicting their minor victims harming animals or committing self-harm, suicide, murder, or other acts of violence,” the FBI said. “The key motivators of these groups are to gain notoriety and rise in status within their groups.”
The group was discovered after police in New York arrested a 23-year-old named Angel Almeida on gun charges and began investigating his social media posts. Items found in his apartment included books pertaining to the Order of Nine Angles, and a flag bearing the insignia of an American O9A offshoot, the Tempel ov Blood.
“Documents and sources familiar with 764 indicate the group is an offshoot of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a violent, subversive amalgam of esoteric Hitler worship, Satanism and Wiccan tenets that American authorities recognize as a terrorist ideology and that has been connected with murders and attempted terrorist attacks in countries including the US, Britain, Germany, Canada and Russia,” the Guardian reports.
Almeida was also in possession of an O9A “blood covenant,” which the Guardian reports featured “a blood-smeared drawing of a hooded figure with glowing red eyes surrounded with sigils for four O9A deities and the caption Vindex, Nythra, Satan and Abatu. At the bottom of the page is an oath: ‘A covenant signed in blood. May the DEVIL walk with you always – SATANAE MANIBUS’ (“by Satan’s Hand” in Latin). Similar indicia have been found in possession of O9A-influenced killers in Britain and Canada.”
“Sources with knowledge of investigations into 764 indicate the group has a network of a couple thousand participants and hundreds of highly active members who generate and disseminate the bulk of the child pornography and gore videos found in the group’s channels on Telegram, Discord and more obscure platforms like Matrix,” the report continued.
According to the FBI notice, the groups target minors between the ages of 8 and 17 years old, especially LGBTQ+ youth, racial minorities, and those who struggle with a variety of mental health issues, such as depression and suicidal ideation.
“The groups use extortion and blackmail tactics, such as threatening to SWAT or DOX the minor victims, if they do not comply with the groups’ requests, manipulate and extort minors into producing CSAM and videos depicting animal cruelty and self-harm,” the FBI warned. “Self-harm activity includes cutting, stabbing, or fansigning. Members of the groups threaten to share sexually explicit videos or photos of the minor victims with their family, friends, and/or post to the internet. The groups control their victims through extreme fear and many members have an end-goal of forcing the minors they extort into committing suicide on live-stream for their own entertainment or their own sense of fame.”
The cult is linked to high-profile crimes, including a German teenager accused of murdering his foster family in Romania.
The FBI is urging people who believe that they may have been victims of the group to contact them on the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov
