FBI Looking for Victims of Supposed 764 Member

The FBI’s Albany, New York, field office put out a call this week asking anyone who might have been targeted by Ryan Catello to come forward. If you haven’t heard the name yet, get comfortable, because it’s an ugly one.

Catello is a 24-year-old from Ravena, New York, charged back in April with receiving CSAM, and the feds now think there could be more victims out there than the two minors named in the original complaint.

According to that complaint, Catello coerced at least two girls, both 16 or 17, into producing explicit images of themselves and then had those images sent to him over the internet.

He went by “stabzone” and “Mors” online, which tells you everything you need to know about the aesthetic he was going for. He allegedly worked his targets through Roblox, Discord, Telegram, Snapchat, and Instagram. The window investigators are now looking at stretches all the way back to May 2022, so this wasn’t a guy who stumbled into something once. This was a pattern, running for years, across basically every platform a teenager might have open at any given moment.

Prosecutors also allege Catello is a member of “764,” and this is where the story gets bigger and, frankly, weirder than your standard predator-gets-caught case.

If you’re unfamiliar, 764 isn’t a gang in the traditional sense, and it isn’t really an organization with dues and a clubhouse. The FBI describes it as a nihilistic violent extremist network, which is a mouthful, but the short version is that it’s a loose online constellation of people who get their kicks pushing vulnerable kids toward self-harm, gore content, and CSAM. All with the stated goal of desensitizing young people to violence and chipping away at whatever social norms are still standing.

It’s less a group you join and more an ideology you catch, spread mostly through Discord servers and Telegram channels where the currency is how depraved you’re willing to get on camera. The DOJ’s own language ties it to accelerationist chaos, the idea being that if you corrupt enough kids and normalize enough horror, you soften up society for something bigger down the line.

And their reach might be growing. Back in June, two students opened fire at San Jose National High School in Tacloban, in the Philippines, killing three of their classmates and wounding around twenty more. The shooters were 14 and 15. In the weeks since, a Philippine Senate investigation has tied that shooting directly to 764, identifying an adult groomer operating under the alias “Sedykh Ryazanov” who allegedly worked to radicalize the two boys.

Cybersecurity researchers are now calling Tacloban the network’s first completed attack anywhere in the world, and Filipino authorities say they’ve pulled two dozen minors out of the group’s orbit since. Kids are dead supposedly because of whatever this thing is.

Here’s my problem, though, and it’s not that I think any of this is exaggerated for effect. The problem is that “764” functions less like a criminal organization with a membership roster and more like a brand that any miserable kid with a Discord account can slap on himself.

Claiming to be part of 764 costs nothing, requires no vetting, and comes with an instant reputation among a certain type of terminally online teenager who wants to feel dangerous. Anyone remember Anonymous? Back in the day, half the internet’s edgelord population claimed membership in that too, and maybe one percent of them had actually done anything more menacing than post a Guy Fawkes mask as their avatar.

I get the same feeling here. Some of the people wearing the 764 name are almost certainly doing real, monstrous harm to real kids, the way Catello allegedly did. Others are probably fifteen-year-olds larping as villains because the label gets them attention in the same rotten corners of the internet where attention is the whole point. That doesn’t make the label meaningless, but it does mean I can’t take “764 did this” as a tidy explanation the way a headline wants me to. It’s a banner, not a chain of command.

None of that changes what actually happened to those kids in Ravena, or in Tacloban, or wherever else this is unfolding right now while some parent assumes their kid is just playing Roblox in the next room.

The crimes are real whether or not the group behind them is as organized as the DOJ press releases make it sound. So if you’ve got a kid on Discord or Roblox, this is your semi-regular reminder that “he’s just gaming with friends” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a sentence that might not be true. Know who they’re actually talking to. It won’t fix the internet, but it might keep your kid off the FBI’s list of potential victims.

Below are images of Catello provided by the FBI. If you’ve been contacted by Catello, you can contact the FBI at this link.