The Com

The Com is a hidden social network for current and future cybercriminals. According to Internet extremism researcher Marc-André Argentino, The Com now acts like a network of violent and extremist groups on the internet. Groups like 764, No Lives Matter, Maniacs Murder Cult and Satanic Front are members of The Com and chat with each other using various messaging apps. The recruiting process usually starts with The Com members starting a relationship with the victim, sending them kind and romantic messages. Once the victim trusts the member, they gradually start to coerce the victim to share private information. After the victim shares the material, The Com starts to blackmail them into sending violent material, for example videos of the victim hurting strangers, their family, or themselves. The Com mostly uses Discord, Telegram, Roblox, Minecraft, Twitch and Steam to recruit victims. According to the RCMP, victims have been forced to cut their wrists or their pets, take photos of themselves placing notes on dead animals/their wounds, or write words on the walls using their own blood. If the victim refuses The Com's commands, they are threatened with being swatted, their family harmed, or having photos leaked to relatives and other people. The Com is split into multiple branches. The first branch, known as "Hacker Com" (formerly "Cyber Com") is responsible for committing cybercrimes like swatting, data theft and creating ransomware. "Sextortion Com" is responsible for recruiting new members to The Com by using sextortion and collecting personal information of contactees with the intention to dox them. Members of this branch mainly indoctrinate underage people to commit self-harm, send sexual images of themselves and spread gore videos and child pornography in the name of The Com. The members of the branches usually have shared interests, ideologies or other reasons to work together in order to achieve their goals. The Com is connected to a group of skinheads active in Russia and Ukraine responsible for random attacks on people and acts of murder. Notable activities Riley Williams, a female member of The Com, is a well-known participant of the January 6 US Capitol attack in 2021. She was responsible for stealing Nancy Pelosi's laptop with the intention to sell it to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service. She bragged about the crime in an affiliated Discord server and admitted of stealing other items. Williams was later arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. She was released early as a result of Donald Trump's blanket pardon of attack participants. The Com has conducted cyber attacks against several high-profile organizations. It attacked HubSpot, Activision, Okta Inc, Doordash, Cloudflare, and Twilio in 2022. In 2023, The Com announced their affiliation with hacker groups BlackCat and ALPHV. The Com then proceeded to attack Reddit, MailChimp, Caesars Entertainment, CoinBase, Clorox, Riot Games, and MGM. MGM said that the attack cost them approximately $100 million. In August 2024, 18-year old The Com member Veer Chetal stole $243 million worth of bitcoin. The transfer was noticed and they were identified by an independent investigator known by his online nickname ZachXBT. Veer was arrested one month later. == Investigations and arrests ==

The Com was investigated by Allison Nixon in 2011, chief research officer of Unit 221B, a cybersecurity organization. According to her, members of The Com were mostly interested in financial crimes until the 2020s, when they became interested in other crimes related to violent acts, misogyny and sextortion of children. Nixon said that The Com's crimes are widespread in US, with every state reporting and investigating the network's crimes. She added that sometimes, the police treat these crimes as terrorism resulting in more speedy investigations and arrests. Unit 221B itself later investigated The Com and found that the number of members responsible for violent crimes was in the hundreds or few thousands. In 2021 law enforcement agencies of the US, UK Germany, Romania, and Brazil launched investigations on about a dozen individuals linked to The Com. In the US, several people were federally charged. In September 2023, the FBI issued warnings about the network as part of their investigation into 764. On January 30, 2025, police in the US arrested two people, aged 23 and 41, as part of a joint Interpol-Europol crackdown on The Com. The men were members of CVLT, a violent neo-Nazi affiliate of The Com that coerced 16 minors into sending porn of themselves and committing self-harm. Also in 2025, a 21-year old British man and Com member was arrested for blackmailing underage girls and was convicted of fraud and making indecent images of children. At the end of July 2025, 20-year-old from Minnesota and member of The Com affiliate "SR1" was arrested who had allegedly stabbed a woman 20 times in a park. Roblox spokesperson Juliet Chaitin-Lefcourt said Roblox are aware of The Com's activities and working to ban them. == References ==