Tag: 764

Dad claims 16-year-old daughter took her own life after meeting a predator on Roblox, slams game platform beloved by kids

Penelope Sokolowski was just 16 years old when she took her own life last February.

Her father, Jason, believes her suicide was the culmination of a grooming process that began on Roblox, the game platform beloved by kids — with some 170,000 users under the age of 13, according to company data from 2023.

“We kind of thought we were covering all the bases,” Jason told The Post, noting that his family had used a third-party app to monitor Penelope’s online activity.

Jason alleges that his only child was contacted by a predator on Roblox who coerced her into cutting his name into her chest and sending videos of herself bloodied from self-harm — and who, ultimately, sent Penelope down a spiral that culminated in her death.

The girl was 7 or 8 years old when she first signed up for Roblox, players rove around online worlds and can chat with other users.

“I’d come in and sit in the room with her and see what she was doing, ask who those people were,” Jason said, recalling Penelope drawing an anime-style sketch for a friend she’d made on Roblox.

“As a dad I thought, oh, this is nice, she’s artistic, and she’s made artistic friends,” he added. “But I didn’t understand what Roblox was and its effect on her.”

The dad, who works in the film industry in Vancouver, British Columbia, separated from Penelope’s mother and moved out of the family home when the girl was 13.

He recalls how Penelope’s grades began to tumble and, when she was 14, he noticed scars from self-inflicted cuts on her arms, which she had been covering with bracelets and his oversized hockey jerseys. 

Penelope confided that she had been recruited into a self-harm group via Roblox, but assured her father she had moved on.

But not long after her 16th birthday, she took her own life.

Later, when Jason opened up his daughter’s cell phone, he found what he describes as a “crime scene.”

According to the dad, there were messages spanning two years with a person who egged on her self-destruction. Jason believes Penelope met this person on Roblox and then began privately conversing with them over Discord — sometimes for hours.

In one exchange, Penelope sent a photo of her chest, offering to cut herself there but worrying she couldn’t go “too deep.” Minutes later, she followed up with an image of the predator’s Discord user name written across her chest in bloodied letters.

In other images, she had carved the numbers “764” into her body. Jason believes Penelope had been contacted by a member of 764, described by the FBI as a “violent online group” that targets minors and grooms them into committing egregious acts of self-harm and violence.

Members of 764 reportedly troll platforms like Roblox looking for victims they can persuade — via grooming or sextortion — into hurting themselves.

“They are grooming girls to do whatever it is they can get a girl to do, whether it’s nudes or cuts or gore or violence,” Jason said. “[Penelope] was brainwashed all the way through.”

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In rare public comments, career DOJ officials offer chilling warnings about online network 764

In striking and chilling terms, several career Justice Department officials on Thursday offered dire warnings about the online extremist network “764,” whose young followers around the world use popular social media platforms to target, groom and push vulnerable teens into harming themselves and others.

“I don’t think Stephen King is dark enough to come up with some of the stuff that these kids are coming up with,” said Justin Sher, a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“It is as serious a threat as you can imagine,” Sher’s Justice Department colleague James Donnelly said. “[And] they’re trying to metastasize the evil.”

Their comments came during a panel about 764 hosted by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. It was a rare public appearance for two career prosecutors who the panel’s moderator described as “the point people” on 764 within the department’s National Security Division.

Sher and Donnelly both noted that 764 members are increasingly trying to push victims to take deadly actions, including suicide or school shootings and other mass-casualty attacks.

As ABC News has previously reported, 764 members find vulnerable victims on popular online platforms, elicit private information and intimate sexual images from them, and then use that sensitive material to threaten and blackmail victims into mutilating themselves, harming others, or taking other violent action — all while streaming it on social media so others can watch and then disseminate recordings of it.

“For them, content is currency,” Sher said. “So they are building their content inventory … and putting it out there to build their status within these groups.”

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FBI opens probe into over 350 suspected members of sadistic ‘764’ group accused of targeting children online

The FBI has announced the launch of a probe into “764,” an online group of nihilistic violent extremists who carry out sadistic criminal conduct, including child exploitation and sexual extortion.

According to a recent press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ), members of the 764 group “use known online social media communications platforms as mediums to support the possession, production, and sharing of extreme gore media and child sex abuse material with vulnerable, juvenile populations.”

“These individuals often conduct coordinated extortions of teenagers, blackmailing the victims to comply with the group’s demands,” the DOJ’s release added.

Members often target unsuspecting children online, utilizing blackmail and extortion to coerce them into sending sexually explicit images or harming themselves or others.

“For nearly 20 hours, they attacked, threatened, terrorized, dismantled my child. Every time he tried to fight back and ask why are you doing this to me, please leave me alone, they escalated,” stated Ohio resident Tamia Woods, a mother whose 17-year-old son committed suicide after having an encounter with the group in 2022.

“James was the victim of financial sextortion, and though he died by suicide, let’s be clear: he was murdered,” she stated. “In those last moments, my son, who had everything to live for, felt like he had no other choice.”

The FBI revealed that the bureau is currently investigating over 350 subjects in connection with the group, after two alleged leaders were arrested and charged in April.

21-year-old Leonidas “War” Varagiannis, a United States citizen residing in Thessaloniki, Greece, and 20-year-old Prasan “Trippy” Nepal of High Point, North Carolina, were the individuals arrested in the April sting.

Varagiannis and Nepal “directed, participated in, and otherwise caused the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and the defendants facilitated the grooming, manipulation, and extortion of minors,” according to a DOJ release at the time.

“Varagiannis and Nepal allegedly ordered their victims to commit acts of self-harm and engaged in psychological torment and extreme violence against minors. The affidavit alleges that the group targeted vulnerable children online, coercing them into producing degrading and explicit content under threat and manipulation. This content includes ‘cut signs’ and blood signs’ through which young minors would cut symbols into their bodies.”

If convicted, both Nepal and Varagiannis face life in prison.

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Teen dies just 3 hours after being ‘sextorted’ as nefarious international groups like 764 target US kids: ‘It’s 100% murder’

The afternoon that 15-year-old Bryce Tate was sextorted started off as a perfectly normal Thursday.

The Cross Lanes, WV, sophomore came home from the gym on November 6, scarfed down a plate of tacos prepared by his mom, then went outside to shoot hoops. At 4:37 p.m., he received a text message from a strange number.

Three hours later, Bryce was found in his dad’s man cave — dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“They say it’s suicide, but in my book it is 100% murder,” Bryce’s father, Adam Tate, told The Post. “They’re godless demons, in my opinion. Just cowards, awful individuals, worse than criminals.”

According to his dad, Bryce was apparently the latest victim of a vicious sextortion scheme targeting teen boys — one that law enforcement says is surging.

A representative for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told The Post the group tracked over 33,000 reports of child sextortion in 2024 alone — with nearly that number reported in the first six months of this year.

Online scammers scour public social media profiles to learn about a teen, then pose as a flirtatious peer.

“They acted like a local 17-year-old girl. They knew which gym he worked out at, they knew a couple of his best friends and name-dropped them. They knew he played basketball for Nitro High School,” Adam said. “They built his trust to where he believed that this was truly somebody in this area.”

The Post is told that the photos Bryce received were not AI-generated but most likely of a real girl who was another victim.

Scammers then ask for illicit photos in return and, once they have them, extort the victim for money by threatening to show the pics to family and friends.

For Bryce, that sum was $500.

“My son had 30 freaking dollars and he’s like, ‘Sir, I’ll give you my last $30.’ And these cowards wouldn’t take it,” a tearful Adam told The Post, recounting his son’s final exchange. 

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