It starts with a message. A notification at midnight flashes up on a teenage girl’s phone.
A voice on the other end that doesn’t sound dangerous yet. Within days, she’s no longer talking about school or friends.
She’s being told what to do, what to hurt, who to fear. By the time her parents realize, it’s too late.
They didn’t just find her online. They hunted her. Across Australia, girls are being lured into violence by voices they can’t see and commanded by strangers who turn fear into entertainment.
Not for money, not for love, but for the thrill of control. The Australian Federal Police call it a new kind of hunt.
And the hunters? They could be anywhere. G’day, Kelda, and welcome or welcome back to Shadow Matter, where I take a look at a darker side of our world with a focus on stories and cases from Australia and New Zealand here every second Sunday.
If you’re a fan of this kind of content and need something unsettling to listen to while you’re doing a roating, consider listening to my podcast.
It’s called Shadow Matter, and you can find it on Spotify. Before we dig into this episode, I’ll have to do the old obligatory moral disclosure.
This episode features some pretty heavy themes and controversial topics. I won’t be going into any gory details, but if you are easily upset or offended by these subject matters, then please be wise and view this with your own discretion.
Likewise, if you find yourself getting triggered or emotionally distressed, I will be providing links to services and helplines like this one at the bottom of the screen or in the description below.
So, I came across an article the other day, and I was shocked by what I read.
The headline reads, “Australian girls being hunted by online gangs.” Naturally, I was a little curious, and in a time when digital freedoms are a poignant topic in the zeitgeist, I decided to click on it and give it a read.
And when you click on one of them, more of them pop up, right? So, now I’m in this rabbit hole, and I’m inviting you to come along with me into the digital darkness.
The article in question comes from BBC and states that, quote, “Australian girls are being hunted by online crime networks and coerced into acts of violence against themselves, their siblings, or pets in a twisted type of gamification, police have warned.”
End quote. The article goes on to say that through investigations, a new task force has been set up by the Australian Federal Police, and at least three people have already been arrested in Australia, and another nine people around the world.
These online predators do not follow conventional motives, the AFP reports. It’s not about sex or even money.
Instead, the perpetrators, mostly English-speaking males aged between 17 and 20, are driven by status, cynical amusement, and a perverse sense of game or challenge.
They recruit vulnerable girls, those battling self-esteem, mental health issues, or isolation, and then push them into what investigators describe as a twisted type of gamification.
Tasks escalate, demands increase, and violence is encouraged. Behind the screen facade, the stakes are real.
The newly formed task force inside the AFP has identified at least 59 alleged offenders in these networks, leading to arrests both in Australia and overseas.
The scale and audacity of the operations are daunting. Victims are traded, new perpetrators take control of already hunted targets, and the violence is both recorded and shared for clout.
For the girls ensnared, the betrayal is profound. What started as a friendly message, a voice reaching out in the dark, becomes a web of coercion.
Instructions come, inflict harm, capture it, share it. Refuse, and the consequences may be revealed or escalated.
They are not simply bullied, they are hunted in the sense they are being targeted, tracked, and manipulated by networks that operate with startling anonymity and efficiency.
The newly appointed AFP Commissioner, Chrissy Barrett, stated in a press conference that the perpetrators were aged in their late teens to early 20s, and were from largely Western backgrounds.
Ms. Barrett also coined a term for these crimefluencers and said they are recruiting preteen or teenage girls through gaming platforms such as Roblox or messaging apps such as Discord and Telegram.
The details of the acts were not shared by the AFP or by Ms. Barrett, but did go on to say that these boys and young men subscribe to a variety of extremist ideologies such as nihilism, sadism, Nazism, and Satanism.
This isn’t just another headline. It’s a sign of how the online world, once thought to be governed by screens and avatars, has become a hunting ground.
The perpetrators don’t need to be in the same room. They exploit isolation, trust, and vulnerability.
And for the victims, teenage girls in Australia, the damage is real, immediate, and terrifying.
But this isn’t new. In fact, it’s been happening for a while in some form or another, and sadly, this isn’t the only case.
Doing some digging online, I came across a few subreddits and found some disturbing anecdotes.
One user posted, quote, “Guys, I need to warn everyone about some seriously messed up stuff on Discord.
This is literally the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I need people to know about it.
There are these super sketchy Discord servers using certain tags on Disboard to find vulnerable girls.
Their groups are huge, like hundreds or thousands of members. They do really horrible things to people who join.
They manipulate them, blackmail them, and force them to do effing horrible stuff.” End quote.
They go on to state the blackmail tactics used by the perps onto their victims, which included but not limited to doxing and swatting.
For those who aren’t familiar with those terms, doxing means to search for and publish private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
Swatting is when you prank call emergency services in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address.
The OP goes on to state that they have been actively investigating these online predators for a while and says that they share a considerable amount of alarming material between their server and their group chats.
Across Reddit and other online forums, fragments of this network have begun to surface. Users claim to have seen the same coded phrases, symbols, and eerie online aliases reappearing across gaming servers and chat platforms.
Names that feel less like people and more like specters. But of course, none of this can be verified, and law enforcement warns that many of these so-called handles are a part of an ever-shifting illusion.
They vanish, re-emerge, and mutate. In the end, chasing the usernames is like chasing ghosts.
What matters is the pattern they leave behind. Young girls coerced, controlled, and discarded by people who know exactly how to hide in plain sight.
Behind the anonymity, there’s a disturbing level of organization. Investigators believe that many of these crimefluencers, as they’re now being called, share coded phrases and emojis to identify each other.
It’s a digital signature, a way of saying, “I’m one of you.” And when the trap is set, when the victim has crossed that invisible line from chat to control, the network tightens its grip.
Some of these girls are told to hurt themselves. Others are told to harm someone they love.
Most of them obey, not because they want to, but because they’ve been convinced there’s no other choice.
It’s not random cruelty, it’s engineered obedience. And unfortunately, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
For years, Australia believed it was insulated from this kind of cruelty. A country that prided itself on safety, on distance, as if isolation could keep [music] the darkness out.
But distance doesn’t mean much when the predator is already inside [music] the phone. Over the last decade, authorities noticed a rise in criminals extorting victims online.
Sometimes, the victims [music] are as young as 12. According to an article from The Guardian dated September 2024, quote, “Children as young as 12 are being coerced into producing extreme content, from sex acts to self-harm, over the internet at a rising rate.
Australian Federal Police have warned parents and guardians.” End quote. Police are calling this sadistic sextortion.
Members from extreme online communities around the world are coercing children on social media and messaging platforms to self-produce explicit sexual and violent content to gain entry to the groups.
Forensic teams have recovered chat logs showing how these offenders collaborate. One girl in Melbourne was pressured to film herself striking her younger brother after weeks of subtle manipulation.
Another in Queensland was told to harm her pet, and when she refused, the group leaked her private photos in retaliation.
Surprisingly, offenders can be the same age as the victims. [music] Also, what’s different about this from a traditional online grooming sense is that the predators aren’t doing this for money or for their own sexual gratification, which is weird when you hear the name, right?
I know, believe me, but they do this for sport. Referring back to the AFP Commissioner Chrissy Barrett’s statement on the subject, the motivation of individuals within these networks is not financial, nor is it for sexual gratification.
This is purely for their amusement, for fun, or to be popular online. End quote.
She also went on to say that because of the age of some of these perpetrators, they may not fully understand the consequences of their behavior.
One case from Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, offers a glimpse into how these predators [music] operate.
A 15-year-old girl, shy and isolated, was approached by a man posing as a gamer her own age.
Over 9 months, he groomed her through online chats, promising friendship, then threatening her into sending self-harm videos and explicit content.
When police arrested him, they found hours of footage, not of desire, but of domination.
The man is now facing charges for sadistic sextortion. It’s one of several active investigations across the country, each revealing a network more decentralized and calculating than the last.
And it’s not just girls who are the victims, either. In September 2022, 17-year-old Rowan Cosgrove from Victoria was found dead in his home 2 days after falling victim to a sextortion scam.
He had been pressured into sending an [music] intimate picture of himself on Snapchat and was threatened the image would be distributed unless money was paid.
There are many more cases and in recent years it indicates a growing trend. Sextortion in Australia is on the rise.
According to The Guardian, this eSafety Commissioner reported 117% increase in reports of image-based abuse for the 2022-2023 period with sextortion the most frequently reported form.
Traditionally, the victim is almost always an intimate partner of the perpetrator, but with cases like the ones I’ve just mentioned, it is truly worrying for our more vulnerable citizens.
For Australia’s youngest generation, the screen isn’t a window anymore. It’s a world. Every conversation, every friendship, every community built and broken online.
And in that digital sprawl, something else has taken root. A quiet, deliberate campaign to radicalize Australia’s youth.
A recent investigation by Gen Z, the generation of digital natives, revealed how far-right extremists are no longer hiding in underground forums or secret chat rooms.
They’ve adapted. They’ve moved to where the young already are. Gaming servers, streaming platforms, meme pages, Discord groups, even TikTok comment chains.
Their methods are simple, almost invisible. They mimic online culture, humor, irony, self-deprecation until their audience drops its guard.
A meme about free speech, a joke about elites, then another slightly darker. Each post shifts the boundary just enough to make the next one acceptable.
In psychology, it’s called normalization. Online, it’s weaponized. These recruiters don’t shout, they whisper. They don’t preach ideology, they package [music] it as belonging.
A teenager joins a gaming voice chat, play for a few hours. One player starts talking about how mainstream media can’t be trusted.
Another adds that men are under attack. It sounds like just another debate, but it’s not.
It’s grooming. The Gen Z report describes this digital radicalization as a culture of shared identity and grievance.
For many of these young Australians, the ideology comes later. What hooks them first is the community.
The extremists know that. They know how to speak in memes and code. They know which influencers to imitate and they know exactly who to target.
Lonely, frustrated teenagers looking for purpose in a chaotic world. The strategy is psychological precision.
They take ordinary feelings, alienation, confusion, anger, and feed them back through a filter of resentment.
The victim begins to believe the narrative, “You’re not lost, you’re awake.” According to a parliamentary report, online platforms remain significant enablers of radicalization.
A small number of minors continue to be attracted to violent extremist propaganda and ideologies.
The evidence is there, but the recruitment methods evolve faster than the laws can keep up.
On the surface, it looks like harmless content, pop culture references, jokes about politics, music remixes with coded imagery, but behind the satire are groups mapping who clicks, who comments, who engages.
Algorithms do the rest. The result is a recruitment funnel so subtle, it’s nearly impossible to trace.
One former gamer told researchers he didn’t realize he’d been radicalized until years later. It started with in-jokes and memes, then group DMs, then private servers where violence wasn’t condemned, it was celebrated.
He said, “They made me feel like part of something important, like I finally had a cause.”
End quote. That’s the danger. These aren’t traditional cults. They’re adaptive ecosystems of identity, politics, and entertainment.
A digital camouflage of humor masking hate. Australian intelligence agencies are now warning that these extremist subcultures are, “Growing faster and recruiting younger than ever.”
End quote. But there’s another layer to the problem. These groups aren’t just recruiting, they’re weaponizing youth itself, turning adolescence into ideology, teaching teenagers to distrust authority, media, parents until only the group remains.
Now, I’m not saying that questioning authority is a bad thing. You should absolutely be able to freely express concerns about your own government.
It’s the beauty of democracy, but these guys are taking it a bit far, especially with minds as young as these.
The shift from meme to militancy is really a leap. It’s a slide. A slow erosion of empathy repackaged as awakening.
In recent years, the far-right playbook has evolved to mirror pop culture. They reference anime, gaming slang, even fashion to hide extremist messages in plain sight.
Their avatars are stylized, ironic, sometimes self-mocking. The disguise makes them harder to detect and far more dangerous.
And I can already hear you typing in the comments and shouting back at the screen, “Back in my day, we just played outside, drank water from the hose, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Yep, and you had to wind up the internet and it ran on steam and it was a two-man job.
I got it. But think about this, before the pandemic, the online world was a playground.
After it, it became home. For teenagers, especially those growing up in the years between 2018 and 2022, the internet wasn’t just a distraction, it was reality.
When lockdowns came, every part of life collapsed into a screen. School, friendships, family arguments, first loves, heartbreaks.
The world outside stopped, but the digital one never did. Social isolation made connection addictive.
Algorithms became companions. Validation came not from the people down the street, but from the ones behind usernames, strangers who felt safer than friends.
The numbers tell the story. Screen time among Australians teens doubled during the pandemic. By 2021, surveys showed that nearly 90% of teenagers reported feeling more comfortable online than in person.
But comfort isn’t the same as safety. Without physical boundaries, digital spaces blurred everything. Play, privacy, danger.
Gaming servers became chat rooms, chat rooms became confessional booths, and confessional booths became hunting grounds.
When a new generation grows up inside the internet, predators don’t need to lure them online.
They’re already there. Psychologists now describe it as ambient vulnerability. An invisible exposure that comes from living too much of your life in public.
For teens, it’s a permanent broadcast. Moods, insecurities, loneliness, all packaged into posts that never disappear.
The pandemic didn’t create that vulnerability, it just amplified it. It taught an entire generation to substitute presence with connection and connection with attention.
And once that shift happened, it was irreversible. When isolation ended, the habits didn’t. The world reopened, but many young people never logged out.
Their identities, their friendships, and even their sense of worth now exist inside systems built to keep them scrolling, responding, and performing.
And in that constant performance, predators and extremists found opportunity. Because when everyone is online all the time, loneliness isn’t something you escape.
It’s something you can sell. For Australia, the implications are severe. These aren’t just isolated chat rooms, they’re breeding grounds for potential violence woven through the same networks used by coercive crime fluencers and digital predators.
It’s not one movement, it’s a mindset spreading through content that looks, at first glance, harmless.
The Australian government’s counterterrorism and violent extremist strategy warns that protecting young people from radicalization must be a, “National priority.”
And this comes at a time as Australia prepares to introduce a world-first social media ban for kids under the age of 16, aimed at minimizing online harm.
However, gaming and messaging platforms are exempt from the new laws, which come into effect next month in December 2025.
So, how else are we keeping our children safe online? And that is the perfect segue into the recently debated topic of digital IDs and passports in Australia.
In Australia, the next revolution isn’t happening on the streets, it’s happening on screens. The government calls it digital ID, a single online credential designed to replace every password, every license, every scrap of paper that proves who you are.
The pitch is simple. One ID, endless convenience. But behind the promise of progress, a quiet unease is growing.
Because the same technology that claims to protect us could also make us more exposed than ever.
Under the proposed system, Australians would log in to government services, banks, even social media platforms using an officially verified digital identity.
Facial recognition, license matching, even AI-driven age checks are being tested right now. The idea, according to policy makers, is to make the internet safer, to stop scammers, identity thieves, and online predators before they strike.
But in practice, it’s not that simple. For every line of code meant to keep people safe, another line [music] collects their data.
For every verification system meant to prevent crime, another system quietly maps the pattern of our lives.
A report from The Guardian warns that the rollout of Australia’s digital ID will fundamentally change how citizens use the internet.
Age verification laws could soon require everyone, even teenagers signing up to social platforms, to prove who they are with a driver’s license or a face scan.
In theory, it’s about protection. In reality, it’s about surveillance. Supporters call it voluntary, critics say it won’t stay that way for long.
Once the digital identity becomes the key to your bank, your health records, and your social accounts, what happens when that key is stolen?
Or worse, it’s used against you. The Optus and Medibank data breaches in 2022 exposed how fragile Australia’s digital defenses really are.
Millions of people had their passport numbers, Medicare details, and driver’s licenses leaked [music] into the wild.
Now, imagine those same details all under one government endorsed ID. A single breach could expose the DNA of a nation.
For young Australians, especially teenage girls already being stalked or manipulated online, that risk takes on a darker shape.
A digital ID doesn’t erase predators, it just changes the rules. Coercion doesn’t always come from strangers, sometimes it comes from control.
A demand to share your login, to verify your face, to prove you are who you say you are.
In the hands of an abuser or an organized network, a compromised ID becomes a weapon.
Imagine a teenage girl blackmailed into sending a verification selfie. The image is then used to create a fake digital identity, a ghost that looks exactly like her.
The same systems meant to [music] authenticate identity could be manipulated to fabricate it. Privacy experts call this the identity paradox.
In the rush to secure ourselves, we’ve built a new kind of vulnerability. And for those already being hunted online, the girls coerced into violence, the teens drawn into extremist channels, a national identity system could become just another layer of control.
A new way to track, catalog, and manipulate. Across the country, protests have already begun.
In Queensland, demonstrators carry signs reading, “No digital collar.” They warn that digital ID isn’t freedom, it’s dependence.
Once your access to essentials depends on a single system, you’re no longer a user, you’re a subject.
Government ministers argue that fears are exaggerated, that the digital ID system will remain voluntary, encrypted, and safe.
But even they admit, {quote} trust will be everything. {end quote} And trust, once broken, it doesn’t reboot.
For the next generation, the so-called digital natives, identity isn’t a document, it’s a reflection of how they live online.
Every message, every post, every trace of who they think they are. Now that identity is being formalized, branded, and stored.
What began as a safety measure could soon become the most powerful surveillance infrastructure Australia has ever built.
The line between security and submission has never been thinner. And when that line blurs, the question isn’t how safe we are, it’s how much of ourselves we’re willing to give away.
The idea of a digital identity didn’t begin in Australia. It started decades ago, born out of convenience, refined through surveillance, and sold as progress.
The first large-scale national digital ID systems appeared in Estonia in the early 2000s. The Baltic nation called it e-Estonia, a model society where every citizen could pay taxes, vote, and accept healthcare with a single encrypted card.
On paper, it was flawless, efficient, transparent. But Estonia’s success came with something else, the realization that a government could now see every digital step its citizens took.
Every login, every form, every file, logged in a ledger of trust. Other nations followed.
In India, the system was called Aadhaar, a 12-digit number linked to fingerprints and iris scans.
Over a billion people enrolled, making it the largest biometric ID database in the world.
But cracks soon showed. Reports of data breaches, identity theft, and wrongful exclusion from welfare exposed the dark side of this inclusion.
In China, digital ID merged seamlessly with surveillance, a backbone of the state’s social credit system.
A citizen’s trust score tied to online behavior determines travel rights, loans, even access to education.
It’s a society where data doesn’t just record behavior, it defines it. Even Western democracies joined the experiment.
In the European Union, the eIDAS framework now allows cross-border digital identification across member states, a digital passport for the online economy.
In Canada and Singapore, biometric verification is already tied to government and banking services. Even Australia’s neighbors in New Zealand, there have already been talks about digital driver’s licenses and passports.
Everywhere, the pattern is the same, a single centralized key that opens every door and records every turn of the handle.
Australia is the latest to join the queue, a nation that once valued anonymity now moving toward a system of perpetual verification.
The concept promises to make life easier, but history shows it always comes with a price.
In Estonia, the database was hacked in 2017. In India, journalists discovered millions of citizen records sold for less than a dollar.
In China, it became a tool for obedience. So when Australia says its system will be voluntary and secure, maybe it means it’s for now.
But the world has already shown us where convenience can lead. The truth is, the digital ID was never just about safety, it was about certainty.
Governments want to know who we are, corporations want to know what we’ll buy, and the internet, the place that once gave us freedom, has quietly become the perfect tracking device.
Digital identity didn’t start as a conspiracy, it started as a solution. The question is, did it solve too much?
This has been an episode on the crimefluencer gangs in Australia, although it sort of segued into something else.
If you or someone you know needs help from online harm, please contact Kids Helpline on 1800 551800, or report any malicious or illegal online behavior to the eSafety Commissioner Report and Support, which is an official government platform to report online abuse, image-based exploitation, sextortion, or grooming.
It also includes educational tools for parents and teens about staying safe online. Link down below, or search for something similar if you are in a different part of the world.
Anyway, I’ve been Shadow Matter, and you’ve been awesome. Like, subscribe, and click that bell like the page won’t load because you’re still on 90s dial-up.
And I’ll see you here next time, in the shadows.
