There's a sadist network called 764 that has been systematically hunting children online since 2021. Not randomly—deliberately.
The network—named after a Texas ZIP code by its 15-year-old founder, Bradley “Felix” Cadenhead—operates across Discord, Telegram, Roblox, and mainstream social media platforms. Its members run fake mental health support groups, showing up in the spaces kids go when they're struggling, speaking the language of empathy and validation, and they are very good at it. Once trust is established, the blackmail begins.
The predator spends weeks, sometimes months, posing as a friend or romantic interest. Once the relationship feels real, they ask for something small. A photo. Not even explicitly sexual at first, just enough to be compromising. The moment the kid sends it, everything changes. That image is now a weapon.
From there the threat is simple: send something worse or everyone you know sees what you already did. Parents, friends, teachers, everyone. Each piece of content the kid produces becomes the collateral for demanding the next—and it always escalates. The loop is designed to have no exit. Compliance doesn't make it stop, it just raises the floor on what comes next.
Its members prey on vulnerable kids. The ones already in pain, the ones posting in mental health forums, the ones talking openly about depression and eating disorders and self-harm. Victims—mostly girls aged 9 to 17—are coerced into producing self-harm content, sexual images, animal abuse, and worse, all livestreamed for status within the network.
The FBI has classified 764 as a tier one investigative priority—the same tier as ISIS. Canada designated it a terrorist organization in December 2025. The DOJ's own domestic terrorism coordinator said publicly it is "as serious a threat as you can imagine." The network is so damaging, the FBI even wrote an open letter to parents urging them to step up their parenting game.
The grooming playbook for this network and the mental health establishment share a critical feature: both remove the parents from the equation.
The network is explicit about it. Isolation from family is a core tactic—coaches victims to keep secrets, to believe their parents won't understand, to trust the network instead. It's a strategy that works because kids have already been primed for it.
For years, the therapeutic and educational establishment has told children that what happens in session is private, that they have a right to confidentiality from their own parents, that the trusted adult in the room is the clinician—not the mother or father waiting outside. Therapists treat parental involvement as a clinical obstacle. The message received by children is consistent: your inner world belongs to you, not your family.
The only intervention that actually works against a network like this is a parent who knows their kid—who notices the behavioral changes, the withdrawal, the new online "friends" their child won't talk about—and confronts them about it.
The warning signs are there: unexplained scars, fearful pets, sudden mood shifts, obsessive secrecy around devices. A parent who has been kept in the loop, who has a real relationship with their child and hasn't been repositioned as a threat to their kid's autonomy, is the only early warning system that exists.
We've spent years building a therapeutic culture that systematically weakens that relationship in the name of adolescent privacy. We told kids their pain was best processed with strangers. We told parents to back off and trust the professionals.
All that did was lay the groundwork for 764.
Soad Tabrizi is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice based in Orange County, CA (www.soadtabrizi.com). Soad is also the founder of www.ConservativeCounselors.com.
