A concerned mother posted online an urgent plea for advice last year: Her teenage son returning from college overseas had been mysteriously detained at a US airport. As her post went viral, commenters suggested she inform Congress and contact civil rights groups.
But federal law enforcement documents obtained by CNN suggest her son harbored dark secrets.
On his phone, customs agents discovered messages encouraging extreme violence, rape, Nazism and self-harm. One photo showed a gun pointed at someone’s head. Another showed Adolf Hitler. Days later, customs officials found chats with the same man on the phones of three European women, discussing organizing bombings in US cities, the documents show.
Those ominous clues all pointed back toward a movement that’s increasingly alarming federal authorities: nihilistic violent extremism, a subculture spreading through loosely connected online groups that seek to sow chaos and are motivated not by political ideology but a desire to destroy society.
The documents, which are unclassified FBI and Department of Homeland Security intelligence reports, provide disturbing new insights into the growing problem – and also illustrate law enforcement’s struggle to crack down on the decentralized movement. The records contain previously unreported cases tied to the movement, including the incident involving the detained teenager, along with a plea from authorities to local agencies for help in spotting and stopping potential bloodshed.
“Mitigating pre-meditated violence by members of this network presents unique challenges,” the DHS memo acknowledges.
The FBI has opened hundreds of cases on members of such groups in recent years, and numerous real-world attacks have been attributed to the ideology – including the bombing of a California fertility clinic and a deadly shooting at a high school in Nashville last year. In other cases, extremists have been convicted of manipulating children into cutting themselves or even killing pets on camera, records show.
FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X in November that his agency had seen an almost 500% increase in arrests associated with the movement. “This is among the most important issues in America and we won’t stop working,” he wrote.
But the movement poses unique challenges for police: groups operate across national borders, use technology to mask their members’ identities and sometimes torment victims in ways that are hard to criminally charge, according to current and former government officials who have spoken at public forums in recent months.
“It seems to me like we are trying to play catch up, but the technology and the bad guys are outpacing us at almost every turn,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said during a December hearing after listening to experts testify about such groups.
Among the many difficulties is separating protected free speech from criminally violent threats – a challenge evident with the teenager detained at the airport. Records state the man told customs officials the content on his phone was a “joke,” and added that he believed “something was wrong” with him. CNN is not naming him because he has not been charged with a crime.
A DHS spokesperson said the agency shares intelligence with law enforcement partners. While protecting Americans’ civil rights, the agency also “ensures that suspicious behaviors indicative of pre-operational terrorist or criminal activity are appropriately shared to help prevent attacks,” the spokesperson said.
Customs and Border Protection also works closely with the FBI to identify, target and address threats, the spokesperson added. The three women identified were refused admission to the United States, according to the spokesperson.
‘Not recognizing the predator’
After Jason Sokolowski’s daughter Penelope attempted suicide in 2023, he opened her phone and found terrifying messages from a shadowy online world. In one note, someone called “Culprit” had demanded she carve the name of a mysterious group called 764 into her chest. She complied and sent a photo as proof, he told CNN.
That was Sokolowski’s introduction to a network of sadistic online extremists. As he grappled with how to help his daughter, he said authorities repeatedly failed to understand the forces that had been exploiting her.
The memos obtained by CNN show that today, some major law enforcement agencies have caught on to the danger. The intelligence reports warn that 764 and its many offshoots have expanded into a transnational, online network that glorifies violence and tries to coerce people, often minors, to hurt themselves or others.
Followers have circulated guides on how to target depressed or mentally ill minors by showing them love, which they then leverage into pressure to produce sadistic content. “Start by social engineering the girl into trusting you,” one guide states, adding, “groom her into producing blood content.”
That’s exactly what happened to Penelope, Sokolowski said in an interview with CNN at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia.
As a preteen, Penelope met people online through the gaming site Roblox, which Sokolowski sought to monitor. But she later joined discussions on more private platforms like Discord, he said. Eventually she met an apparent member of 764, a group that emerged around 2021 and uses sextortion and other psychological tools to groom and force children into self-destructive acts.
“My daughter, at a certain point, started to think she was an evil person meant to create chaos and harm in our world, but that wasn’t who she was three months prior to that,” Sokolowski said.
As Sokolowski sought help, he said police and health care experts didn’t understand what was happening.
“I said, ‘She has these names carved into her body.’ How come nobody here is talking about this? How come no one is able to give me any insight on this?’” he said. “As a society, we’re not recognizing the predator.”
Penelope took her own life last year, just days before her 16th birthday. Sokolowski said 764 members bear responsibility, though he also believes she might have survived if authorities had more effectively responded. Sokolowski said the people who exploited his daughter have not been caught.
Court records show in the last year, numerous other members of 764 and similar groups have been charged with exploiting and harming minors.
In April, authorities arrested two alleged 764 leaders living in North Carolina and Greece who authorities said recruited followers with images of child sexual abuse and then guided them to extort girls into self-harm.
In October, authorities filed a superseding indictment against 21-year-old Baron Cain Martin of Arizona, accusing him of membership in 764 and other groups and exploiting children – including a 13-year-old girl who carved swastikas into her body at his direction. He has pleaded not guilty.
In December, 19-year-old Alexis Aldair Chavez of Texas, who helped lead a related nihilistic network called 8884, pleaded guilty to racketeering and multiple acts involving sexual exploitation of children.
The FBI is currently investigating more than 400 subjects tied to violent online networks associated with 764 and its offshoots, and all field offices across the country are involved, the agency said in a statement.
As criminal cases have increased against members of violent nihilist groups, related abuse reports have also risen. Last year, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received more than 3,000 reports involving sadistic online exploitation, a 130% increase over the year prior, said Lauren Coffren, an executive director with the center.
The sadistic content that nihilistic groups extract from children “becomes the currency to be able to blackmail them further into other kinds of terrible activities,” Coffren said. “That’s a challenging factor because that is something that we haven’t historically seen.”
But the threat of extremist nihilistic groups goes beyond individual harm to exploited children, the federal memos obtained by CNN show.
Global threat
On May 17, a bomb rocked Palm Springs, California – shaking structures for several blocks, shattering glass and leveling one innocuous-looking building. It was an unlikely target, authorities soon realized – a fertility clinic.
Maher Abdallah, a physician and director of the clinic, marveled that no one was killed in the office because the bomb went off on a Saturday morning. But he wrestled with the same confusion as authorities: Who would want to destroy a fertility clinic?
“I’ve never heard of a bombing targeting an IVF center that creates life,” he said. “It just doesn’t even make sense.”
The answer came when police found an online statement written by 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, who died in the car bomb blast.
Bartkus referred to life as a “disease” and linked to other nihilistic content from his website. Authorities charged another man who held similar extremist views with providing the explosive materials; he later died in custody.
The unusual case points to another rising threat from these groups, according to the DHS reports and experts – mass casualty events like bombings and mass shootings.
A DHS memo from October warns of the threat of followers expanding from “criminal activity and smaller acts of violence to mass casualty violence,” that could be live-streamed online for attention. “This can create a dangerous escalation, where individuals seek to outdo one another in the scale or severity of their violent actions.”
The Palm Springs bombing isn’t the only real-world evidence of the threat.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit research organization, has tracked nihilistic attacks across the globe, including stabbings in Sweden by teenagers associated with a group called No Lives Matter, and the killing of three girls in northern England. The non-profit also found a teenager who stabbed people outside a mosque in Turkey appeared to have been influenced by nihilistic subcultures.
In Nashville, a teenager who killed a girl when he opened fire inside a high school cafeteria last year left behind a statement and other content that referenced 764 and celebrated nihilistic violence, one of the DHS memos states.
Some cases cross international borders.
In Fort Worth, Texas, a 17-year-old named Evan Banda allegedly lit multiple cars on fire in December and had discussed plans for mass murder after connecting with an international group that has a “nihilistic” philosophy. Local police said Banda told them he discussed potential school shootings with the group and participated in the recording of a video of a local school that featured a caption stating the group would “kill a lot of children.”
Authorities have charged Banda with terrorism, arson and possession of child pornography, among other counts. An attorney for Banda said he was investigating the facts of the case and could not comment on specifics.
One of the DHS memos obtained by CNN urges customs officials to watch for members traveling through US ports of entry while carrying digital content depicting violence or sexual abuse.
The memo cited a case in February 2025, where customs agents at a Texas airport interviewed a British national who had been identified as the administrator of a 764 group on Telegram. Agents found apparent discussions of child sexual abuse material on the traveler’s phone and learned the British national had come to the US to visit a minor. The traveler confessed to extorting others to commit self-harm, the memo said.
For Sokolowski, the magnitude of the threat urgently requires more awareness and intervention both by law enforcement as well as health care workers, teachers and families.
“We have a new thing happening in our society that we don’t understand, and we’re plowing forward while our children are getting decimated,” he said.
If you or a child you know is a victim of sexual exploitation, submit a tip to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at report.cybertip.org.
