The National Crime Agency (NCA) of the United Kingdom has warned about the existence of Communities ‘Online’ mainly integrated by adolescent boys and dedicated to inflicting damage, committing crimes and sharing misogynistic and violent content.
The NCA has recently shared the national strategic evaluation, an annual report that includes the main threats to national security and that in its new edition highlights the existence of what it calls ‘Networks with’, ‘Online’ communities that “usually share harmful content and extremist or misogynist”.
These communities act in Social networks, forums and messaging services And among its usual contents are “extreme and illegal images that represent violence, bloody violence and material of child sexual abuse, which normalizes and desensitize participants to increasingly extreme content and behaviors.”
The report affects its members, since They are mainly teenage boys “motivated by status, power, control, misogyny, sexual gratification or an obsession with extreme or violent content.”
Given the seriousness of the situation, the CEO of the NCA, Graeme Biggar, has warned about these “sadistic and violent gangs online” to all those who can contribute to reducing the risk of those communities, “from the forces of order to parents and guardians, education professionals and industry.”
Extreme contents, manipulations and cyberdelites
These communities do not operate in the one known as the Dark Network (‘Dark Web’) but on daily use platforms, to which young people have easy access. In them, its members exchange “sadistic and misogynist material“, but also They manipulate and threaten their victims to do serious or sexually abuse of themselves, their brothers or their pets.
Among its activities are also included Cyberdelitessince, as they have detected, they work together to launch attacks of ‘malware’ or ‘ransomware’ -which encrypts computers to ask for money in exchange for freeing the information -, commit fraud and display social engineering techniques to harass their victims.
NCA analysts estimate that thousands of users, both aggressors and victims, have exchanged millions of online messages related to sexual and physical abuse. Reports on this threat were also sexual in the United Kingdom between 2022 and 2024.
In its warning, the NCA has underlined gravity pointing out that these communities normalize and desensitize young people to increasingly violent content and behaviors, also causing them to develop “a dangerous propensity to extreme violence. “