An original member of 764 and leader of one of its offshoots was sentenced to 77 years in prison, the longest imprisonment ever imposed on a nihilistic violent extremist, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Kyle William Spitze pleaded guilty in December 2024 to two counts of producing child sexual abuse material, possession of CSAM and distributing animal crush videos. A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee sentenced Spitze to the maximum punishment for each count and ordered him to serve all terms consecutively.

The 27-year-old of Friendsville, Tenn., victimized dozens of girls and coerced multiple victims under threats of doxing and swatting to produce CSAM of themselves, self-mutilate and produce Spitze’s online moniker in their blood. 

When investigators obtained Spitze’s cell phone under a search warrant in February 2024, they found about 25 photo albums titled with nicknames or first names containing the same images and videos he uploaded to his Telegram channel depicting some of these acts. Officials also found videos of dogs, rabbits and chickens being decapitated by his victims under coercion.

In Spitze’s plea agreement, he admitted he had a terrorist motive in committing his crimes. 

“These types of crimes are the worst of the worst: preying on vulnerable children in the name of a violent and twisted ideology. Federal law enforcement will not stop until nihilistic violent extremist groups and their depraved members are identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.

Spitze, also known as “Chrimhn,” “Criminal,” and “Criminaloli,” was also an administrator of the 764 network “Harm Nation.” 

The groups, which are affiliated with The Com, are part of a sprawling network of thousands of people, typically between 11 and 25 years old, seeking to foster social unrest by destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations.

“Today’s sentence of 77 years, the longest federal sentence ever imposed on a nihilistic violent extremist, sends a strong message that civil society will not tolerate such depravity,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement Wednesday. 

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, applauded the long sentence. “I wish other countries could recognize that these people are not the kind that rehabilitate, and adjust sentences accordingly,” she said. 

Spitze’s sentencing follows a period of heightened law enforcement activity, which has netted arrests and lengthy prison terms for multiple alleged 764 leaders and members. 

Alexis Aldair Chavez, who began associating with 764 as a child in 2022 before leading an offshoot 8884, was sentenced to 40 years in prison last month for blackmailing and coercing multiple girls to commit self-harm, torture animals and degrade themselves on camera to produce CSAM. 

Other alleged 764 members arrested since 2025  include: Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, Baron Cain Martin, Tony Christopher Long, Erik Lee Madison, Zachary Sweeney and Aaron Corey.

The FBI said it began investigating Harm Nation in December 2023 after Discord sent the agency a report about the group, including members and victims’ use of the platform. Investigators quickly identified Spitze as one of the most prolific members of Harm Nation and the administrator of an affiliated Telegram channel. 

“Today’s sentencing sends a strong message that this FBI and our Department of Justice partners will relentlessly hold accountable any individual who preys on children,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement. 

“This FBI is laser focused on identifying, locating, and arresting any participants in nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) networks — and we have dedicated personnel across all 50 states working on these high-priority investigations,” Patel added. “We arrested 500% more NVE offenders with our partners last year for a reason — because we have a renewed mission to bring these predators to justice, and that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

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A pair of young men were sentenced to 66 months in jail for committing a cyberattack on the Transport for London that brought the network’s operations to a standstill in 2024, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency said Thursday.

Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers were arrested at their homes in September 2025, barely a year after the attack, and pleaded guilty last month just as their trials were set to begin. Flowers was previously arrested in connection with the attack in September, but was released after questioning by officers.

Jubair and Flowers were leading members and highly involved in Scattered Spider, a nebulous hacker subset of The Com, according to researchers. The 20-year-old Jubair was a prolific cybercriminal and core member of the unbound collective. 

U.S. authorities last year accused Jubair of direct, prominent involvement in at least 120 cyberattacks, including extortion of 47 U.S.-based organizations and the January 2025 attack on the federal court system. 

Officials said they traced a combined total of at least $89.5 million in cryptocurrency, at the time of payments, to Bitcoin addresses and servers controlled by Jubair. Two financial services firms paid Jubair $25 million and $36.2 million, respectively, in Bitcoin between June and November 2023, according to an unsealed criminal complaint against Jubair. 

At the time of Jubair’s arrest, “he was one of the four principal people that we associated with Scattered Spider,” and one of the two most core players, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. 

Jubair and Owens had significant resources and support, and “victim payments were reinvested back into the enterprise,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B. 

The lasting impact of Jubair and Owens’ capture and imprisonment remains hazy.

U.K. authorities insist Jubair and Owens’ arrests and punishment “effectively halted the group’s criminal activity,” yet they added that other cybercriminals continue to use the Scattered Spider brand in more recent attacks. 

Thursday’s announcement “represents a significant step in holding accountable two members of Scattered Spider, a group that has repeatedly relied on data extortion, SIM-swap attacks, and other social engineering techniques to infiltrate networks and undermine critical services,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, said in a statement. 

The FBI also noted, in a LinkedIn post, that members of Scattered Spider “continue to victimize organizations around the world and cause significant financial and operational harm.”

When Owens, now 18, was first arrested for the Transport for London attack in 2024, investigators said he was “in the process of hacking the systems of U.S. health care companies SSM Health Care Corporation and Sutter Health, which had been infiltrated and damaged.”

Officials also said Jubair and Owens failed to cooperate after their arrests. 

“This is the largest cybercrime prosecution ever brought before the U.K. courts and the culmination of nearly two years of painstaking work,” Paul Foster, head of the National Crime Center’s National Cybercrime Unit, said in a statement. 

“Scattered Spider has been the most significant cybercrime threat to the U.K. in recent years. Through this investigation, we have severely disrupted that threat and brought key offenders to justice,” Foster added.

Despite the upbeat reaction from U.K. officials, Nixon said the punishment for Jubair and Owens is “remarkably lenient considering the period of continuous reoffending lasted longer than the sentence.”

Nixon hopes the United States will eventually extradite the pair to face additional charges. “If that happens, they won’t be able to use mental illness as a loophole to get back to harming society as soon as possible,” she added.

“No one who worked on their case was surprised they would reoffend, and there seems to be no allowance in the law to protect the public from what everyone knew was going to happen,” Nixon said. “I know the narrative in the cybercriminal culture will glorify them, but they wouldn’t if they knew the full story.”

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A San Antonio man who sexually exploited children while leading 8884, an offshoot of the notorious violent extremist collective 764, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in federal court Wednesday, the Justice Department said. 

Alexis Aldair Chavez began associating with 764 as a child in 2022 when a co-conspirator introduced him to 7997, one of many 764 offshoots affiliated with the Com. The sprawling nihilistic network of thousands of people, typically between 11 and 25 years old, seek to foster social unrest by destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations.

The 19-year-old, also known as “Zack” and “Zack8884,” attempted to coerce a girl to commit suicide and blackmailed another girl into self-mutiliation, animal torture and illicit content production in late 2023, according to court records. He later worked with multiple co-conspirators and blackmailed some of his victims to coerce other girls to degrade themselves on camera and produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Chavez was arrested and has been detained without bail since October 2024. He pleaded guilty to multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children in December 2025 and faced up to 60 years in prison for racketeering, distribution and possession of CSAM.

“Chavez’s crimes reveal the ruthless exploitation and manipulation at the core of nihilistic violent extremist groups,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. 

“These organizations target children as part of their broader mission to spread terror. These groups ultimately seek nothing less than the destruction of our society,” he added. “The National Security Division will use every resource at its disposal to identify and prosecute 764-linked criminality and to protect the most innocent among us from these predators.”

The indictment filed against Chavez in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas details a series of horrifying crimes he committed with co-conspirators and some of his victims. 

Prosecutors said Chavez and a co-conspirator coerced a girl to cut her tongue, and torture and kill a cat on a live video call in late 2023. He and co-conspirators also, that same month, groomed and extorted several other girls to commit self harm and degrade themselves on camera.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, told CyberScoop the sentence is appropriate even if people understandably dislike imprisoning young people. 

“In this space, a certain personality profile is highly predictive of who will risk a prison sentence like this: an obsession with maximizing harm,” she said. 

“Reoffending after release is a huge problem. All major global hacking incidents from the Com are done by serial reoffenders — all obsessed with harmfulness, some graduated from the 764 sextortion space,” Nixon added.

Too many jurisdictions are naive in how they handle cases involving members or associates of the Com, allowing these criminals to go home to parents who won’t supervise them, she said.

Officials pressed on this in their reaction to Chavez’s sentencing as well. “Parents need to know what their children are doing online and must stay engaged, ask difficult questions, and not fall into the trap of believing their child is ‘just playing games’ or ‘just talking with their friends,’” Justin R. Simmons, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said in a statement. 

“There is darkness present within many people in this world that want nothing more than to see the United States and western civilization fail. There is no limit to the actions these individuals will take to accomplish that goal, including torturing and abusing children,” Simmons added.

Chavez, who was also ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution and serve lifetime supervised release, joins other 764 members already serving long sentences for similar crimes. Bradley Chance Cadenhed, who founded 764 as a 15-year-old in 2021, was arrested later that year and sentenced to 80 years in prison in 2023. 

When the FBI executed a search warrant at Chavez’s residence in July 2024, prosecutors said he came out the backdoor and threw his phone over a neighbor’s fence in an attempt to hide evidence.

Chavez’s sentencing follows a period of heightened law enforcement activity, which has netted arrests of multiple alleged 764 leaders and members. Some of the alleged 764 members arrested since 2025  include: Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, Baron Cain Martin, Tony Christopher Long, Erik Lee Madison, Zachary Sweeney and Aaron Corey. 

“True rehabilitation is the best outcome, but no one knows how,” Nixon said. 

“The total number of offenders who fit this harm-obsessed profile is vanishingly small. Giving them maximum sentences won’t overflow jails,” she added. 

Law enforcement and judges have to be realistic about what it takes to prevent the victimization of children, and handing down lifelong or lengthy prison sentences strikes the right balance between the rights of the offender and society, Nixon said.

FBI officials and agents who track these offenders and gather evidence on their crimes draw similar conclusions. 

“Nothing is more abhorrent than those who prey on children and other vulnerable members of our society and this defendant will pay a steep price for doing just that,” Coult Markovsky, acting assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said in a statement.

“This sentencing demonstrates the FBI’s unwavering resolve to identify, hunt down, investigate, and prosecute criminals like Chavez who prey on children through violent online networks, including 764, and orchestrate horrific, unspeakable acts of exploitation and violence,” Daniel Faith, special agent in charge of the FBI San Antonio field office, said in a statement. 

“These predators use social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, chat rooms, and video services to groom vulnerable children,” Faith added. “Staying engaged in your child’s online life, maintaining open communication, recognizing the warning signs, and reporting suspicious online activity to law enforcement are critical to stopping these offenders.”

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