When I first heard about these groups, I couldn’t fathom what was occurring. What are gore groups, how are they targeting our children, and what is their ideology and why are they doing this? I’ve been in the FBI for over twenty years and worked crimes against children, I thought I had seen it all, but this information angered me. I believe parents, trusted adults, teachers, friends, caregivers, and grandparents need to be aware of this threat targeting the mental and physical safety our children.
Gore groups are a dual program threat for the FBI. They are classified as counterterrorism racially motivated violent extremist groups with online sexual exploitation and extortion of the children in our communities. These gore group actors build the perception of themselves as a gang or a cult. These actors are on popular online platforms such as Telegram, Discord, Minecraft, and Roblox. The sole purpose of these groups is to desensitize our children to extreme forms of gore, sexual and violent activities such as animal cruelty, beheadings, murders, suicides, self-harm, body carvings, in order to achieve the collapse of Western society through the degradation of social norms.
Gore groups are deliberately targeting minor victims on messaging apps to extort them into live-streaming acts of self-harm and producing child sexual abuse materials allowing the group members to control and blackmail victims in order to gain status within the group. Victims are extorted into sending images of self-harm, such as cutting themselves, or videos and images of “fansigning.”
“Fansigning” is when the subject pressure a victim to write or cut specific numbers, letters, symbols, or words onto their bodies and photograph them to send to the group. The subjects then train these minor victims on how groom other minors to ultimately lead to their extortion through blackmail. Thus, making victims into subjects. Many members have an end-goal of forcing the minors into committing suicide on live-stream for their own entertainment or their own sense of fame.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received hundreds of reports of minors extorted into hurting themselves in 2023, and they receive dozens each month. These numbers went up drastically from 2022.
Subjects are both in the United States and outside the US. Victims are everywhere and quickly becoming subjects themselves as they groom other minors. The groups target minors between the ages of 8 and 17 years old, especially LGBTQIA+ youth, racial minorities, and those who struggle with a variety of mental health issues, such as depression and suicidal ideation.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a public service announcement on September 12, 2023, titled “Violent Online Groups Extort Minors to Self-Harm and Produce Sexual Abuse Material.” https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2023/PSA230912
Both WIRED and Washington Post have pushed out stories on these groups to provide awareness about these sadistic predators. On July 19, 2024, the United States Attorney’s Office Western District of Michigan put out a press release announcing a “Member of Violent Online Child Pornography Network Pleads Guilty to Sexually Exploiting A Child” Western District of Michigan | Member Of Violent Online Child Pornography Network Pleads Guilty To Sexually Exploiting A Child | United States Department of Justice
The FBI advises the public to take a number of precautionary steps, including:
- Looking for fresh cuts, bruises, wounds, and scars in unusual patterns;
- Looking for sudden behavior and appearance changes;
- Being attentive to children wearing long sleeves or pants in unusual circumstances;
- Monitoring children’s online activity and discussing the risks of sharing information and content; and
- Running frequent online searches of family and children’s information to help identify and prevent the spread of personal information on the internet.
If you are worried about someone who might be self-harming or is at risk of suicide, please consult a health care professional or call 9-1-1 in the event of an immediate, life-threatening emergency.
John Morales
Special Agent in Charge, FBI El Paso
With El Paso so close to the Mexican border and Mexico in the throws of revolutionary struggle during the early 1900s, southwest Texas became a key focus of the Bureau soon after its founding in 1908. As the FBI heads into its second century, the El Paso Division remains committed to protecting the people and defending the nation while upholding the rule of law and the civil liberties of all.