Your child's favorite game is being used to hunt them.

I am going to tell you something that I wish every parent in America could read before they let their child open Roblox, Minecraft, Discord, Instagram or Fortnite today.

There is an online predator network called 764 that is actively hunting children on those platforms right now. The FBI has classified it as a new form of modern-day terrorism. Every single FBI field office in the country is involved in tracking it. There are more than 450 open investigations as of this writing.

Most parents have never heard of it.

The FBI told me these groups are like the Sinaloa drug cartel and ISIS combined. When the FBI uses language like that, people need to pay attention.

So what is 764?

764 started as a single Discord server in 2021, created by a 15-year-old in Texas. It has since splintered into a decentralized network of smaller cells operating across multiple platforms and multiple countries. The name comes from a zip code in Stephenville, Texas where the original server was created. The founder was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The network grew anyway.

The FBI describes it as operating at the intersection of violent extremism, child sexual exploitation, and other forms of extreme violence including animal cruelty, self-harm, and assisted suicide. Those words are not exaggeration. They are the documented findings of federal investigators who have spent years inside these networks.

Here is the part that every parent needs to understand. The recruitment is invisible.

If you picked up your child's phone right now and looked at their screen time, you would see Roblox. You would see Minecraft. You would see Discord. You would see Instagram. They are also on Fortnight. All of them are legitimate platforms. All of them are marketed to children. None of them raise any red flags on their own.

That is exactly how 764 designed it. They recruit on platforms where children already are and where parents expect them to be. A predator approaches your child as a friend, someone who shares their interests, someone who seems to understand them. The relationship feels real. The manipulation is invisible until it is not.

Once contact is made, predators build trust over weeks or months. They present themselves as romantic interests, best friends, or the one person who truly understands. They look for vulnerability. They specifically target chat rooms about eating disorders, depression, LGBTQ, anxiety, loneliness, or family problems. Those children are not weak. They are being deliberately selected by people who have made a study of how to manipulate them.

Once trust is established and the predator obtains a single compromising image or piece of personal information, the dynamic shifts completely. The child is told: do what we say or we send this to your school, your parents, your friends. From that point the coercion escalates. The demands get worse. The child feels trapped and too ashamed to tell anyone.

A 13-year-old boy named Jay died by suicide after a 764 member in Germany pushed him to take his own life. His parents are now suing Discord, alleging the platform enabled one of the most dangerous child abuse networks in modern history. Jay's case is not an isolated incident. It is a documented pattern.

I have spent eight years fighting to make schools safer. I know what it looks like when an institution fails to protect children. I saw during the Parkland School Shooting — warning signs ignored, information siloed, nobody connecting the dots — is happening again online with 764. Children are showing warning signs. Adults are not recognizing them. And the systems that should protect these children are reacting after the fact instead of preventing the harm.

Next week in Part 2 I am going to tell you exactly what the warning signs look like, what to do if you suspect your child has been contacted, and what I am calling on schools and lawmakers to do about this. Because this is not just a parenting problem. It is a school safety problem. It is a public safety problem. And it requires the same coordinated response that we have been building for physical school safety.

Part 2 publishes next week. I will cover the warning signs, what to do if your child has been contacted, and what every school district in America needs to build right now. Share Part 1 with every parent you know today.

For Alex. And for all of them.

— Max Schachter