The National Crime Agency (NCA) of the United Kingdom has warned about the existence of Integrated ‘online’ communities mainly 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 ‘com’ com ‘, online’ communities that “usually share harmful content and extremist or misogynist rhetoric”.
These communities act on social networks, forums and messaging services and among their usual contents are “extreme and illegal images that represent violence, bloody violence and child sexual abuse, which normalizes and desensitize participants before contents and increasingly extreme behaviors”.
The report affects its members, since they are mainly teenage children “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 of these “sadistic and violent gangs online” to all those who can contribute to reducing the risk of these 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, their members exchange “sadistic and misogynist material”, but also manipulate and threaten their victims to do serious damage or sexually abuse themselves, their brothers or their pets.
Among their activities are also included cyberdelites, since, 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 by 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”.