How gun-toting Texas mum Becca Spinks takes down online cult 764
She describes herself as “just a normal mum”, is hunting predators online who are targeting Aussie kids through their evil twisted acts. See the video.
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EXCLUSIVE: This is the gun toting Texan mum looking to take down a new wave of sadistic online abusers grooming Australian kids to livestream sick and twisted acts from their bedrooms.
In July, the self-defence educator and independent investigator, Becca Spinks, hopes to be in court to watch 25-year-old Kyle Spitze, from Tennessee, get a hefty jail sentence after he agreed to plead guilty to charges of possessing child sexual abuse material and distributing ‘animal crushing’ videos.
One of his victims is Australian.
“I just want to look at him and see if there’s any kind of soul left,” Spinks said.
“Every time I’ve seen him on video, in a picture, he just looks demonic. He looks evil.”
None of Spitze’s charges relate to the NSW victim, now 18, but the FBI found pictures of her on his phone, and she alleges he and other members blackmailed her into doing livestream sex acts and self-harm shows. She was also forced to carve their names into her body with a blade.
Spitze is a big scalp for Spinks, 40, who describes herself as “just a normal mum”, who hunts predators online in her spare time.
His big mistake was posting a video of his stepfather shooting him in the ear in January 2024, which went viral. His victims, who saw the video, began outing him on social media as a pedophile and sadistic Satanist in an online cult called 764, and an offshoot group called HarmNation.
“The day that video went viral, Kyle was on X threatening the girls who were trying to speak out against him, and his tag was Criminal764,” Spinks said. “We looked at his followers and we found all these other abusers.”
Her online detective work, along with help from his victims, including the mother of the Australian teenager, played a significant role in bringing Spitze to the attention of the FBI.
And it shone a light on these deviant misfits, some children themselves, who get off on torturing mainly young girls to take part in degrading sex acts, live ‘cut shows’, animal abuse – one victim bit off the head of their hamster – and where the ultimate prize is getting someone to livestream their own suicide.
Unbelievably, the group’s US-based founder, Bradley Cadenhead, a gore video junkie, was himself just a child of 15 when he set it up in 2021. He was jailed for 80 years in 2023 for creating videos in which children were sexually abused, choked, beaten and suffocated.
While Spitze and Cadenhead are in the US, it has global appeal, with offenders operating all over the world, often out of their bedrooms. Australia is not immune. In a warning about groups including 764 last year, the Australian Federal Police said a 14-year-old from WA was found to have child abuse material and videos of animal cruelty on his phone after targeting victims overseas. He was charged in 2022 and received a juvenile caution in relation to the matter.
Spinks said her efforts to expose Spitze and 764, upset other offenders, including ‘Acid’ – real name Cameron Finnigan – 19, from the UK.
“Figures like Acid and a few others started to really harass and threaten me because they didn’t like the attention they were getting,” Spinks said. “So I just kept it up, you know? And over time, I became like the public face of all of this.”
Finnegan has since been jailed for six years for encouraging suicide, possessing a terrorism manual, and indecent images of a child. Police discovered swastikas and pentagrams on his bedroom walls.
Spinks said 764 and groups like it are continually evolving, and popping up in different forms, but they all operate under an umbrella community nicknamed the ‘Com’.
Some align themselves with pedophiles, or Satanists or white supremacists, or a mix, or none of the above. The one common thread is their desire to terrify and traumatise their victims in order to gain status and notoriety within their groups.
They seek out vulnerable victims in self-harm or eating disorder chatrooms, as well as on social media and gaming apps like Minecraft and Roblox.
Their modus operandi is to befriend kids on social media and gaming apps, shower them with affection, before manipulating them into providing something like an explicit photo of themselves – then threatening to share the photos unless they produce ever more extreme content.
Many victims don’t recognise themselves as victims, and are sometimes persuaded to become abusers themselves.
It’s hard to believe that there is anything worse than this, but other extremist groups are also gaining the attention of authorities, including the Maniac Murder Club, which originated in Ukraine, and is also known as MKU or MKY, which Spinks described as a group of “satanic serial killing terrorists, that is even crazier than 764”. Another, No Lives Matter, has a similar agenda.
They want followers – and victims-turned-abusers – to move into real-world violence.
“No Lives Matter is like the splinter group that was created by MKU to get 764 kids to do more violent, real life stuff,” Spinks said. “So they wanted to pull them away from the child abuse and extortion and towards real life acts of violence and terrorism.
“Your kid can become a victim, but they want your kid to become an abuser as well. They want your kid to go commit a school shooting, right? They want your kid to commit suicide on camera. I hate to say it, but these are not your normal child sexual abuse types of people who try to get in and leave.
“There’s a cult behind it. These kids are the foot soldiers, so to speak. They can wind these kids up like little wind-up toys and send them on their way via whatever means that they can.”
The Global Network on Extremism and Technology, run by academics from King’s College London, describes MKU/MKY as a “militant accelerationist” group that advocates for acts of violence in order to bring down the current social order.
Sometimes there is a political bent, but mostly it is about “offline criminality, including assault, murder, and terrorism to maintain their membership”.
Australia’s domestic intelligence agency ASIO has repeatedly warned about the worrying rise of kids being indoctrinated in their bedrooms.
In August, when ASIO raised the terrorist threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’, head of the agency, Mike Burgess, said the number of children embracing violent extremism is increasing and that “extremist ideologies, conspiracies, misinformation, are flourishing in the online ecosystem and young Australians are particularly vulnerable”.
University of Adelaide Associate Professor Tim Legrand said his work involves looking at the spread of online extremism and its effects on young Australians, particularly males.
He explained that the internet is an amplifying space for a tiny number of bad actors.
“You probably have a lot more lurkers, observers, readers, than active people,” Assoc Prof Legrand said. “These perpetrators have large audiences and they generate infamy. And so given that most children over the age of 14 have a mobile device in their pocket, they have potentially audiences of millions.”
He said from those only a very small percentage would go on to offend, but “small percentages of large numbers, are large numbers”.
Spinks said most parents are ignorant of the dangers these groups pose, but that if a child is on the internet unsupervised they are at risk of being abused or being groomed into becoming an abuser.
Helen Schneider, from the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE), said parents should be aware of what their child is doing, seeing and saying online.
And, if their child has been a victim, they need to reassure them it’s not that fault and to report to the ACCCE.
She said warning signs include kids being online more, being more secretive about their devices and being on them at different times of day and night.
Spinks said when she first shone a spotlight on these groups she was disbelieved and mocked, but following a flurry of arrests and warnings from crime agency authorities, things are changing.
“I’m on a vindication arc because of all the arrests and stuff. I’m like, finally the cavalry came in because, for a while here, it was just me,” she said.
The Australian victim’s mum said she will be forever grateful to Spinks.
“She was the only person I had helping me for the longest time,” the mum said. “If I had not found her, and if she had not been posting about it, I would have completely given up.
“Without having that one person who knew what was going on, who was fighting in our corner, I doubt I would have managed to keep pushing for justice for my daughter.”
For help with emotional difficulties, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or www.lifeline.org.au
For help with depression, contact Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36 or at www.beyondblue.org.au
The SANE Helpline is 1800 18 SANE (7263) or at www.sane.org
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