UK Crime Agency Warns about Rise of Abusive and Manipulative Com Networks
Serious and organized crime causes more harm to more people than any other national security threat, according to a new report from the UK National Crime Agency (NCA). Although the threat increased in the UK in 2024, it did so more slowly than in previous years. Some threats, though, continue to rise notably, including in child sexual abuse, drugs, and illicit finance, as well as fraud and organized immigration crime.
“We said last year that the societal shift to living more of our lives online was being exploited by criminals in the form of cybercrime, fraud, and child sexual abuse,” according to the NCA Director-General Graeme Biggar’s introduction to the 2025 National Strategic Assessment of Serious and Organised Crime. “One of the most striking themes emerging this year is how the threat is diversifying between and beyond these threats, with a growing overlap with online radicalisation to serious violence and extremism. Other technological trends, such as increased adoption of artificial intelligence and easy access to communications channels with victims without content moderation or other safeguards, are allowing offenders to scale their offending more readily.”
The report analyzes intelligence about serious and organized crimes in the UK primarily between September 2023 and October 2024 through consultation with partners across the UK government, policing, intelligence, and the private sector.
One notable change to the serious and organized crime threat landscape is the growth of sadistic online networks of predominantly teenage boys. Participants in these loose online forums—called “Com networks” in the report—collaborate or compete to cause harm both online and offline, including criminal actions related to cyber, fraud, extremism, serious violence, and child sexual abuse.
Known reports of this threat increased sixfold in the UK between 2022 and 2024. Although adults are involved in these Com networks, the NCA said it is especially concerned about the likely thousands of teenage boy offenders, who often share sadistic or misogynistic material targeting those their own age or younger—egging each other on to conduct worse and worse behavior. These networks are not on the Dark Web and are easily accessible through gaming platforms and messaging apps.
“Online networks of offenders engaging in a range of online offences (‘Com networks’) have been identified grooming, blackmailing, and threatening victims into carrying out extreme acts, including sharing sexual material and self-harming,” the report said. “Vulnerable young victims are targeted and groomed online, and controlled through fear and manipulation to extort imagery and cause harm. These networks typically attract young males promoting nihilistic and misogynistic views, who attempt to gain status with other users by committing or encouraging harmful acts across a broad spectrum of offending.”
In a number of cases, girls as young as 11 have been coerced into seriously harming or sexually abusing themselves, siblings, or pets.
“Evidence suggests that offenders are motivated by gaining notoriety and status, which can be achieved based on the harm they inflict and the depravity of the content they share,” Biggar said. “These networks share content relating to a broad and diverse range of extreme belief systems that they use to justify violence.”
Two recent school shootings in the United States highlight the growing—and often misunderstood—trend of nonideological terrorism. https://t.co/LMrpKZEJdW
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According to NCA Director General for Threats James Babbage, “Competitive and collaborative behaviors involved in gaming may also be another way that people get drawn into competitive and collaborative behavior in these forums, and then become desensitized to the sort of violence they’re seeing. In an attempt to gain kudos and notoriety, they seek to outdo what they’re seeing others do.”
This is essentially the “online equivalent of urban street gangs committing crimes to make money, cause fear and harm, and gain notoriety,” Babbage told The Independent.
Although the gamification of threats isn’t new, the speed of escalation in these crimes is notable, Biggar said.
“We’ve seen a number of mass victim offenders in child sexual abuse cases before, but the level of social networking, the pursuit of notoriety within the networks, and the speed of moving to the most extreme harms is new and shocking,” he said.
Technology, of course, continues to complicate and speed up online child abuse. Offenders manipulate legal generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create child sex abuse materials. In addition, voice cloning software and AI tools make grooming children easier for offenders who want to invent a child persona. Nudifying apps, image editing apps, and generative AI models can also be used to create or threaten the creation of a fake nude image of a victim for the purposes of sexual or financial extortion.
“The use of generative artificial intelligence systems without safeguards to prevent the generation of indecent images of children will undermine law enforcement efforts to identify and safeguard victims,” the report said.
