Brooklyn Feds Unmask Neo-Nazi Cult Preying on NYC Kids in Global Sextortion Web

The recent collapse of a predatory online cult exposes the alarming digital vulnerabilities facing New York’s youth—and society’s tepid defences against extremism in the internet age.

When federal agents raided five homes from Queens to California last week, they unearthed not only terabytes of encrypted evidence but a labyrinthine web of cruelty ensnaring children from as young as eleven and stretching across the Atlantic. The revelation: the so-called “Greggy’s Cult,” an online sextortion ring, had deep ties to 764—a neo-Nazi syndicate trading not just in images but in influence, trauma and real-world violence. Brooklyn prosecutors, unsealing their indictment on Tuesday, described a scheme at once chillingly modern and perversely archaic: predators trawling videogame chatrooms and shepherding the vulnerable into the darkest corners of the internet.

At first blush, the case reads as another instance of online exploitation—a grim but familiar headline. But federal investigators, along with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) June report, contend this was only the tip of the iceberg. The indicted five, acting as ringleaders, manipulated children into producing explicit videos and marking their own bodies to ‘prove loyalty’—a grotesque reversal of the digital world’s promise as a realm of connection and play. Authorities further allege that “Greggy’s Cult” operated in concert with 764, a group whose ideological roots twist back to the Order of Nine Angels (O9A), a far-right extremist bunch melding Satanism, neo-Nazism, and a fondness for mayhem.

764 is not a relic of the past: its 15-year-old Texan founder, Bradley Cadenhead, was convicted to an 80-year federal term in 2023, but acolytes carry on. Their endpoint is not merely the exploitation of the young and vulnerable but a campaign of escalation. Victims, frequently battling issues of mental health, sexual orientation, or body image, were recruited on incautious child-oriented platforms such as Roblox before being lured to more private spaces like Discord—where consent and oversight vanished. There, manipulations grew ever more grotesque: “tests of loyalty” requiring self-mutilation, animal cruelty, and in the most tragic cases, murder.

The implications for New York City are both immediate and profound. The city’s youth once played stickball beneath stoops; now, for many, adolescence unfolds online, in social networks and gaming guilds—and, as it turns out, within reach of global predators. The city’s authorities, led by the Department of Justice’s Eastern District, have scored a rare, if belated, victory, but the contours of cyber-victimisation continue to shift faster than official responses. City public schools and libraries, already buffeted by budget woes, have little insulation against such digital infiltration. The NYPD’s fledgling cyber unit, meanwhile, is left racing to catch up as predators cloak themselves in ever-new anonymity.

Beyond the daily trauma to individual victims, this case portends graver, second-order consequences in the civic and social fabric. Each fresh outrage—be it the Antioch High School shooting in Tennessee or a grisly livestreamed stabbing in Turkey—shows how what begins as manipulation online can metastasise into bloodshed offline. The city’s sprawling multinational community is both a shield and a risk: a populace that makes targeting harder, but also magnifies the scale of vulnerability. Economically, the rise in ‘sextortion’ has corollaries in missed school days, lost earning potential for parents navigating fraught recovery, and sharply rising costs for already stretched social services.

Perhaps most insidiously, each lurid case shines a naked bulb on the puny efforts so far directed at addressing digital radicalisation. For decades, New York has embraced its status as a “city that never sleeps,” but the 24/7 digital agora it built grants bad actors a backdoor into homes in every borough. Local politicians are now belatedly debating new rules for platform accountability and digital literacy—moves which, if achieved, may simply drive predators further underground. The city’s famously robust civil society has so far mustered only tepid action: a handful of awareness campaigns and underfunded hotline numbers.

Outside metropolitan New York, the pattern holds—and sometimes worsens. The proficiency exhibited by 764 and its ilk owes much to global mimicry: the so-called Maniac Murder Cult (MKY), a Russian-Ukrainian forerunner, supplied not merely ideology but a toolkit for digital grooming and coercion now exported worldwide. Unlike blood-and-soil predecessors, these groups need no physical territory, rendering international responses languid and fragmented. It is notable that despite high-profile cases in Germany, Romania, and Turkey, there is still only paltry coordination among national law enforcement or tech companies.

The American approach to these threats has, so far, alternated between shock and slow proceduralism, rather than strategic pre-emption. Even the Department of Justice’s recent indictments attend mostly to crimes after the fact; prevention, data-sharing, and psychological support lag far behind. Other countries fare no better: Europol and INTERPOL boast cyber units, yet jurisdictional boundaries and privacy constraints stymie cross-border operations. The result is a bleak digital commons, maintained by the lowest bidder.

A new arms race in digital child safety

What, then, is to be done? The Economist’s cool assessment is that more technology, not less, ought to be at the heart of defences. Algorithms that now service micro-targeted advertising might be deployed to spot the fingerprints of grooming and coercion on gaming platforms and messaging apps. But this would require unprecedented cooperation between social media giants, regulators, and city governments. Tech companies mutter about privacy and innovation, even as predators use their platforms to devastating effect; lawmakers are quick to posture but slow to legislate. The doctrinaire dichotomy between freedom and security has, once again, left children holding the bill.

Even so, we are sceptically optimistic that New York’s scale and density afford a laboratory for more robust intervention. The city has a history of making ungovernable problems tractable—be it crime waves or epidemics—when it musters political will. A pragmatic fusion of better algorithms, civic education, and targeted policing could mitigate, if not eradicate, these digital horrors. Yet the pace of innovation, and the relentless resourcefulness of bad actors, bode poorly for outright victory.

What lingers is the irony that New York, a city defined by openness to the world, now must defend its youngest citizens precisely because the metropolis is open, boisterous and plugged in. With the law forever a beat behind, the burden shifts to parents, schools, and—ultimately—the companies that profit from the metropolis’s connectivity. For now, justice, and perhaps only a little more safety, is on the side of the data and those who can act upon it most nimbly. ■