ROCKFORD, Ill. (Rockford News First) – Cases of online extremist networks targeting children have increased in the U.S., according to federal investigators. Now, child safety experts are sounding the alarm, urging parents to take caution. Just days ago, a leader of global violent extremist network 764 plead guilty to conspiracy to sexually exploit minors.Jamie Powers is a complex trial litigator with Dolman Law Group. She says these predators use trust to prey on kids online. “The network not only consists of older men, but also younger individuals,” she stated. “And so, they target children, they gain their trust, they either are a peer, so someone their age or someone pretending to be a peer. So that’s the start of the trust saying, hey, I’m just like you. And then it just escalates from there.”Powers adds the predators build trust through attention and positive affirmation and typically go after children looking for connection and friends. “Then they meet someone who has shared interests. And that gradually then shifts to control after they have something from the child,” Powers describes. “So, it can be something like getting leverage through an image. Like, you know, I deal with sexual exploitation cases all the time where it’s an image of the child’s body exposing themselves. It could be a secret, it could be personal information, and that’s when the threats start. So, exposure, I’m going to show your parents these pictures, or I’m going to tell everyone that you are in these questionable chatrooms.”She also points out the perpetrator often threatens to harm the child or even their family. “It’s very gradual,” she says. “It’s very slow moving. But as soon as there’s any type of leverage that they can have over the child, then that’s used to exert control.”Emphasizing just how scary this situation is, Powers recognizes that parents are typically trained to watch for creepy, adult strangers, not other kids.“When you have a peer who games with your kid that looks like a friend, even sounds like a child, that threat then doesn’t look like a threat. It looks like it’s another 15-year-old with the same headset as your child.”Powers says she tells parents to sit down with their child and go through the child’s friend list as if it’s a real-life friend list or as if it’s a list of classmates at the school. Ask the child, how do you know this person? Have you ever met this person in real life? Do I know this person or their parents?“If it starts getting questionable, like, this person lives in Australia or I’ve never seen them before, but we talk all the time, then it can kind of get the parents’ red flags up a little more,” she demonstrated. “If you don’t know what this person looks like, maybe we can sit down with this person and they can show you what they look like, right? So, it’s having the parents get more involved with the child’s friend list as if it was the friend sitting in front of them in real life.” Often times this abuse might get harder for parents to detect if it’s moved to a private chatroom, server or a different platform. “Like Snapchat, where there’s disappearing messages or even just through video calls where that’s not necessarily captured, the contents not necessarily captured,” Powers added. “So, it’s a red flag in terms of, if you’re sitting down with your child and saying, okay, how are you talking to this person? Oh, we’re talking through Snapchat. Then it’s like, okay, then why are you talking through Snapchat? Whose idea was it to go on Snapchat? Let me see those texts, right? So, it’s one of the things, you know, families can keep in mind, you know, as they’re getting more involved with the online activity of their child to ask on what other platforms are you speaking with this person?”Powers tells RNF shame and fear of getting in trouble keeps exploited children from speaking up. “Silence isn’t necessarily a sign that the child is okay,” Powers stated. “When red flags come up and if a parent suspects that something is happening with their child, the simple phrase of saying like, you’re not in trouble, you’re not going to get in trouble. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on can do wonders.”Stated matter of fact, Powers says she does not think platforms, like Roblox and Discord, are doing enough to keep kids safe. “Things like this keep happening despite the lawsuits that have started to increase since last year when we started filing them, despite the new safety rollouts,” she explained. “Things are still happening. Predators are getting around the age verification systems; kids are getting around the age verification as well. And so more needs to happen and more companies like Roblox Discord need to hold themselves truly accountable for what’s happening on their platforms.”So, what should a parent do if they’ve discovered that their child has been targeted in this way? Powers says let the child know they are not in trouble, stay calm and walk through what happened with the child.“Obviously the first reaction is going to make a huge difference in how much information your child gives you,” she said. “And I think the second thing to think about is preserve evidence. I know the instinct is to get rid of these terrible messages, these terrible photos, but screenshots of messages, screenshots of usernames, even profile links or dates, any screenshots of chats that helps law enforcement track down the perpetrator and it helps certainly the legal team as well.” Powers also suggests parents become educated about the dangers of kids being online and to spread the word to other parents. “Being online, this day and age as a child, it is so different than when we were kids,” she explained. “And so I think just understanding how dangerous it is is the first step to awareness and to making sure that our kids are safe and that they’re online in a very safe way.”Copyright 2026 Rockford News First. All rights reserved.
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