Children in the US, some as young as 11, were allegedly ordered by a South African teenager to perform sex acts on themselves and to torture and even behead their own pets.
And they allegedly had to film what they were doing and send the footage to him.
The shocking claims are contained in the charge sheet against the teenager, laying bare what he allegedly put the children through before his arrest at the upmarket Mount Royal Golf and Country Estate on Monday.
The 16-year-old’s arrest came after the FBI, the US Embassy in Pretoria and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children alerted SA police to a person linked to the 764 online network who was operating in the country.
The 764 network is a violent online network that targets children and other vulnerable people, using grooming, threats, blackmail and coercion to force victims into sexual exploitation, self-harm, and animal cruelty.
The teenager appeared in the Malmesbury Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.
He is still behind bars and is due back before the same court on Thursday.
He may not be named because he is a minor.
His identity is known to IOL.
When the reporter visited the estate on Wednesday, a security guard telephoned his parents, who said they did not want to speak.
The guard said the couple had left a short while earlier.
A resident told IOL the arrest had been “extremely dramatic”.
Other residents declined to comment.
It is understood that the boy worked at a desk with two screens, a mechanical keyboard, a gaming headset, and a studio-style microphone, with a cellphone propped up beside them and LED strips glowing along the wall and under the desk.
The state, according to the charge sheet, said he was a major player in 764, and that his behaviour had become increasingly violent in the weeks before his arrest.
The state called 764 a cult with a satanic ideology.
It named Telegram, Discord, Snapchat and Instagram as the platforms he used to make contact with the children.
He allegedly used a Vodacom SIM card.
He was home-schooled and had left a high school in Malmesbury midway through 2024 after two terms there.
Eleven American children aged between 11 and 17 have laid complaints against the boy.
He was charged with seven sexual offences, two counts under the cybercrimes law and two counts of animal cruelty.
The charges spanned seven months, from January this year until police nabbed him on Monday.
He was 15 when the alleged offences began.
All 11 were allegedly committed in Malmesbury, according to the charge sheet.
Two of the charges dealt with animals, one with dogs and one with cats, and the two annexures used the same words.
“Ill-treat, neglect, torture or maim or cruelly beat or terrify an animal, to wit dogs, by inciting other minors associated with the ‘764’ group to harm, torture and mutilate the animals,” the annexure read.
The state did not allege that he harmed the animals himself, but that he told other children to do it.
Three of the charges dealt with what was found on his phones and his computer, split between saved chats, images and videos.
“Storing videos depicting child sexual abuse material of minor victims on his electronic devices including cell phones and computer,” the third of the three read.
A further charge dealt with what he did with it.
“Accessing social media platforms and sharing images depicting child sexual abuse material to members of the group ‘764’,” the distribution annexure read.
The most serious charge was compelled self-sexual assault.
It alleged that he instructed and incited girls in the group to masturbate and perform other sexual acts on themselves without their consent.
A second charge, sexual exploitation of children, alleged that he engaged the services of children in the group for reward, and that the reward went to other members of 764.
A third alleged that he showed children the material to draw more of it out of them.
“Group chats with other minors in order to obtain child pornography,” read the count of exposing children to pornography.
The two cybercrime counts named his targets as minors associated with 764, one alleging that he sent messages threatening violence and the other that he sent messages inciting it.
The preliminary inquiry cover sheet, the document used to record the details of a child’s case when it first comes before court, listed three of the charges by name, one of them being grooming.
Printed on the face of several annexures was the punishment the law prescribes for an adult convicted of the offences.
“A regional court or a high court shall sentence a person it has convicted of an offence referred to in Part 1 of Schedule 2 to imprisonment for life,” the possession annexures read.
“A first offender, to imprisonment for a period not less than 10 years,” they read of the lesser class of offence.
Those minimums do not apply to child offenders, but they are what the same charges carry for an adult.
Magistrate A McKenzie sat in open court on Tuesday, and the boy was there to hear the charges read out.
The court explained his right to legal representation, and his attorney came on record for him.
The state told the court the annexures were preliminary, and the charge sheet was not yet final, before reading the charges into the record and opposing his release.
It said 764 trafficked in the incitement of self-harm, sexual abuse and the decapitation of animals, and that some of the children drawn into the network had taken their own lives.
Eleven victims had been identified, all American citizens aged between 11 and 17, and all 11 had laid complaints.
Police had seized several of the teenager’s devices.
The state said the offences were serious and that a district surgeon needed to examine him to determine whether he could be held criminally responsible before the mental-health referral process could begin.
It also told the court there was no place for him at a child and youth care centre.
Carstens said he had not yet fully consulted with his client and did not oppose him remaining in custody until the district surgeon had reported back.
He reminded the court that the child justice law is intended to steer children away from the criminal justice system rather than punish them, and said a care centre might not have space for him anyway.
No bail application was made.
The defence told the court a formal application would have to be brought before the boy could be released.
The state then asked the court to order him to hand over the password to one of the seized devices. His attorney answered for him.
“Child offender exercises his right to remain silent and will not place anything before this court,” the court record read.
McKenzie did not conclude the preliminary inquiry required under the child justice law and remanded the boy to Thursday for the district surgeon’s evaluation.
He ordered that the boy remain in police custody in Malmesbury until then and warned his parents, who were in court, to bring him back.
The raid followed intelligence from the FBI, the US embassy in Pretoria and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children that a target linked to 764 was operating in SA.
They traced him to Malmesbury and, according to police, caught him in the act.
A preliminary examination of his devices at the house uncovered explicit images and videos of child sexual abuse and animal mutilation.
“The ‘764’ networks are violent international online extremist networks associated with child exploitation,” national police spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Amanda van Wyk said.
The network has been on the FBI’s radar for years.
The bureau has warned parents that its members target children on social media, gaming apps and chat groups, befriending them before asking for an explicit picture.
That picture is then allegedly used to blackmail the child into producing more, with the demands escalating to self-harm, sexual acts and the killing of a family pet.
Members share the footage among themselves and use it to control the child.
Some children targeted in this way have taken their own lives, the FBI said, while its Chicago office has described the members as a “gore group”.
“What these juvenile predators are doing is depraved,” Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, said in a warning to parents this year.
The bureau said it had more than 450 subjects under investigation across all 56 of its field offices.
Two men accused of running the group’s inner server, Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, were arrested in Greece and North Carolina last year.
IOL News
