Cameron Finnigan was just 19 when he was convicted of preparing to murder a homeless man living in a tent near his home in Horsham, West Sussex. He was also found guilty of trying to manipulate a young woman into killing herself. “The only risk I was concerned about,” he later said in a police interrogation, “is if she went through with it and I got caught.”
In 2023, a 17-year-old German teenager named Nino Luciano went much further. A video uploaded to Discord and then spread across “gore” websites shows him walking up to an 74-year-old woman, saying “Hello” to her, and then stabbing her to death. He had earlier attempted to kill an elderly man by pushing him down a staircase, but he survived.
Finnigan pleaded guilty to encouraging suicide, possessing a terrorism manual, and indecent images of a child in January this year. But while he was convicted under terror legislation, his actions did not have a clear political motive. Luciano’s motives are similarly complex.
Finnigan went by acid764 on Telegram and Luciano by Tobbz764. They were part of an online network called 764 that revels in violence and suffering for its own sake. Those tied to 764 chase the thrill of inflicting pain, coupled with a hunger to carve out infamy as the most unhinged members in the group chats on Telegram, Discord and Wire that form part of the network.
Cameron Finnigan (left) and a Baphomet tapestry found in his bedroom (right)
Nino Luciano showing his bloodied knife to the camera
Its members are primarily youth and young adults. So are their victims. 764 is an online extortion community focused on grooming and ultimately forcing young people to harm themselves and others. A large amount of the material shared is child exploitation material. The focus on children is practical as the group deems them easier to influence and extort. Members also revel in targeting children to make the outside world disdain them even more.
The network is made up of hundreds of chat groups across a range of platforms and spans the US, Europe and South America. Subgroups and individuals within it strive for notoriety in the community through outdoing others. Videos of their crimes are meticulously recorded and shared in the groups.
It is a broad network where the groups are only loosely affiliated and might not subscribe to all aspects of what originally made up 764. Over time the network has morphed and parts have shifted its focus away from online harms to direct offline attacks such as those by Luciano.
Escalating violence
Since 2021 a number of arrests by individuals affiliated to 764 have taken place across the US, where it originated, and Europe. In the US there have been at least 13 arrests related to 764, with all being charged with child exploitation material and two school shootings where the perpetrator had connections to 764. Eight of these have been 20 or younger. In Europe details of cases are scarce because perpetrators tend to be minors and more often relate to violent crime. Cases of child exploitation material are nevertheless common.
One of the youngest of these perpetrators was a 14-year-old from Stockholm, Sweden, who was arrested in 2024 after attacking mostly elderly people on eight different occasions by sneaking up on them from behind and stabbing them late at night. He filmed most of the attacks. The 14-year-old went by the moniker Slain764 in the network and ran the local section of “No Lives Matter” (NLM), a group affiliated with 764 focused on offline violence.
NLM has members in multiple European countries, including the UK. Finnigan was, according to Telegram messages seen by HOPE not hate, also part of NLM.
According to the BBC, at least four British teenagers have been arrested in connection with the network. In addition to Finnigan, Vincent Charlton, 17, was jailed for terrorism offences and having videos of a girl cutting his name into her body in 2023.
Vincent Charlton
764 is likely the most extreme and organised example of a disturbing trend of children and young people being radicalised online through an obsession with gruesome material and death rather than a well defined political ideology. In July last year, the UK was shaken by the murder of three young girls in Southport. Crimes committed by a teenager who, like Finnigan and the Swedish teenager, lacked a clear ideological motive but had immersed himself in violent online content before stabbing three children to death.
This shift is playing out against the backdrop of an increasingly violent online environment with laxer moderation becoming the norm and social isolation having allowed especially young people to submerge themselves in these extreme communities. Wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine have further accelerated the spread of violent images, with footage of real-world atrocities flooding the internet. In communities like 764, such images are not viewed with horror but as inspiration, fueling a cycle of desensitization, competition, and escalating cruelty.
Exploiting the most vulnerable
764 appeared in January 2021 and was created by American teenager Bradley Cadenhead, then 16 years old. Cadenhead had spent much of his childhood in the disturbing online world of torture and “gore” content, videos and images depicting extreme violence, suicide, death in general, plus tortured and mutilated bodies. 764 took shape within the “Com” network, a criminal online community focused on extortion.
In the 764 Discord chat room, Cadenhead and others began sharing material they had collected while extorting other minors and shared advice on how to do it. The group targeted vulnerable people online often focused on mental health or LGBT+ communities. A manual released by NLM tells readers that “the best women to target are ones that have depression or mentally ill ones”.
Targets are groomed and persuaded into sharing personal details and sexual material. Under threat of sending the content to their family and friends the victims are then forced to commit ever more extreme acts. This can start a spiral that in some cases has led to victims taking their own life, in other cases they have themselves been forced to participate in the targeting of others. Victims have been forced to carve the usernames of their abusers into their skin, attack their siblings and kill their pets. In 2021, Samuel Hervey, a 25-year-old from Minnesota, was pushed to suicide by self-immolation by a 15-year-old girl connected to 764. His death was livestreamed for an online audience.
Over time, 764 has increasingly taken inspiration from Order of Nine Angles (O9A), the Nazi satanist cult originating in the UK that has grown into a subculture phenomenon whose extreme aesthetic and transgressive image has been adopted by far-right accelerationist groups. The group has also been tied both terrorism, torture and child exploitation material. In 2011, Ryan Fleming, who ran a local chapter of O9A and was part of Nazi terror group National Action, was jailed for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy, who he had imprisoned and tortured.
There is little indication that 764 has deeply engaged in the texts and ideology of the O9A. But its aesthetic can easily be adopted for shock effect. Moreover, O9A, which infamously describes how to ritualistically “cull” (murder) people and how to select a deserving victim, provides language and a justification for the otherwise theoretically superficial 764.
764 and similar communities show that there is an attraction to embracing transgression and extremity. In 764, willingness to commit extreme acts and disdain for the mainstream has built a small, select group. An NLM chat on Telegram exposed by Expo last year urged members: “You who are outcasts from society, you who feel bullied, you who feel mistreated. Stop thinking like a victim. Stand up for yourselves and create pure panic and terror in society. Always remember, you are the predator.”
Nihilistic Accelerationism
While 764 and NLM borrow heavily from far-right accelerationist groups, especially in terms of aesthetic and strategy of documenting and spreading records of their violence online. They do not fit neatly into the far right. It has led researcher Marc-André Argentino to label it “Nihilistic Accelerationism” because while their methods align, their goals are not the same. 764 does not seek to “instate a white imperium”, as Argentino writes, but primarily wants to cause chaos.
But just because an attacker is not primarily ideologically motivated does not mean that extremist ideologies do not play a role in the violence. The Southport killer had a copy of an Al-Qaeda training manual without otherwise engaging with Salafi-Jihadism but according to a senior official interviewed by The Guardian he was “absolutely obsessed with genocides”.
Even without ideological dedication, extremist ideologies still give direction, a strategy to copy and material to build mythos on. For the disturbed mind they provide something to aspire to. A desperate and mentally ill perpetrator needs to somehow decide who is deserving of their rage.
764 groups have increasingly begun reproducing far-right ideas as justifications for its violence. The NLM document is riddled with references to Order of Nine Angles and uses the same terminology for its victims. O9A justifies violence and even death because of their hatred of who it considers to be lower standing people and believes that through acts of violence its followers evolve into god-like creatures. After he murdered the 74-year old woman, the German teenager, Luciano, wrote on Telegram: “I feel like God. I can decide who lives and who dies.”
764 have also taken on an antisemitic conspiracy theory common in far-right accelerationist circles as well as in the O9A. Members believe that Christianity and its ethics are a Jewish invention aimed at weakening Western society and must be overcome through violence.
Looking closer at members also complicates the picture. According to court documents, Finnigan shared images containing O9A symbology and made one reference to Hitler but did not otherwise seem to have taken part in far-right spaces. He instead had a background in gore and child exploitation communities and would later join the “Com” network network and eventually 764 within it.
Luciano, on the other hand, directly engaged in fascist Telegram chats in 2021. In them he used racist slurs against black people and posted a message saying “heil hitler!” in October 2021. He also allegedly chose his victim based on his belief that she was a Roma person. But before joining 764 and taking “Tobbz764” as his alias he used the username “HVRTCORE” on Telegram. Hurtcore, a portmanteau of the words “hardcore” and “hurt”, is a term used for the most extreme forms of child exploitation material.
Hard to escape the violence online
The 764 phenomenon appeared at a time in which violence material and gore content online have become more accessible. Violent online material, and even extreme gore communities are by no means new, but content originating in them appears to be increasingly spread on regular social media platforms while young people spend more time in front of their screens.
A recent survey by the Youth Endowment Fund identified TikTok as the platform where teenage children are most likely to encounter real-life violent content, with 30% of all 13 to 17-year-olds reporting exposure to physical violence on the platform. X/Twitter was also identified as one of the platforms where people are likely to encounter real-life violence.
Wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine has at the same time provided another steady stream of gruesome content. This makes it increasingly hard to protect oneself from violent material online.
What sets 764 and some gore communities apart, however, is how the desensitising effect is not an accidental or slowly moving process, but deliberate. The groups wants to intentionally shock and numb its participants and watch the fallout as entertainment. In this context, fascism, other extreme ideologies, and even paedophilia become effective tools to provoke. But the difference between being a dedicated Nazi and someone so fascinated by its horrific violence that one seeks to replicate it is only an interesting question in theory. It still helps motivate violence and it spreads the ideas to new and younger audiences.
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