The Com member gets prison for sextortion

On July 2, at Leeds Crown Court, a member of the cybercrime collective known as The Com was sentenced to two years in prison for blackmail and sextortion. The sentencing, which also added the offender to the National Sex Offenders Register and imposed a 10-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order, caps an investigation that began with a local arrest in October 2023 and expanded into a global probe involving the UK’s National Crime Agency.

Who is Justin Swaddle

Justin Swaddle, a 20-year-old from Leeds, operated under the aliases 'Epstein', 'Rugen' and 'Moscow' on Snapchat, Telegram, and Discord. He was first arrested by West Yorkshire Police in October 2023, before the NCA took over the investigation in January 2024.

After pleading guilty to multiple child sexual abuse offenses and blackmail, Swaddle was sentenced today. The court's decision follows a guilty plea entered on July 2, with sentencing delivered at Leeds Crown Court.

The victims and the evidence

The NCA identified 117 female victims worldwide, aged from 13 to 17. On Swaddle's seized devices, investigators found images of children ranging from three to 17 years old, with several showing the results of acts that Swaddle had encouraged.

Telegram messages recovered from the device showed Swaddle had attempted to incite a child to sexually abuse a younger child and record it for him, threatening to leak indecent images if further content was not received. Numerous images depicted victims with self-harm injuries, including Swaddle's aliases carved into their skin, and indecent images of children in Categories A to C, with A being the most severe.

How The Com operates

The Com, short for Community, recruits and grooms victims through online platforms, coercing them into self-harm, violence, and the production of child sexual abuse material, often through blackmail. As Europol reported earlier this year, the collective is organized into multiple subgroups, each with distinct criminal focuses.

• Offline Com: promotes property damage, harming others, and committing acts of terrorism
• (S)extortion Com: coerces minors into sex crimes and encourages self-harm and suicide
• Cyber Com: orchestrates network intrusions and ransomware attacks
• 764: a subgroup that surfaced in 2021, notorious for grooming young people into producing explicit content later used for extortion or shared among members

Attribution and statement

Justin Swaddle targeted young and vulnerable victims all over the world to abuse and scare them into carrying out shocking self-harm and sexual activity, purely to gain popularity with his peers online. He gained the trust of his victims, before collecting private information about them so he could threaten to share their intimate images or report them to their school or parents to incite further content.

Danielle Pownall, an operations manager at the NCA, made these remarks in an official statement.

Broader crackdown on The Com

In February, a year-long Europol-led operation dubbed "Project Compass" led to 30 arrests and 179 suspects being linked to The Com. Europol also flagged 4,340 URLs for removal during a multi-week July operation targeting online content tied to the group.

Two alleged 764 leaders, 21-year-old Leonidas Varagiannis and 20-year-old Prasan Nepal, were arrested in April 2025 and face life in prison for operating an international child exploitation ring.

Links to other cybercrime

The Com was previously linked to ransomware attacks against Las Vegas casinos in September 2023 and, more recently, UK retailing giants Marks & Spencer, Co-op, and Harrods in April 2025. These connections highlight the group's dual focus on online exploitation and high-profile cybercrime.

What this means for parents and investigators

This case shows the international reach of online grooming and extortion networks. The NCA identified victims across the world, and the severity of the harm—self-harm injuries and coerced abuse—is stark. For parents and guardians, the case reinforces the importance of monitoring children's online interactions, particularly on platforms where anonymous communication is common. It also suggests that law enforcement faces an ongoing challenge in keeping pace with evolving methods of exploitation, even as coordinated operations like Project Compass yield arrests and disruptions.