Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) has rescued a 13-year-old girl in Karachi from the international online abuse network known as “764”, after an alert from a foreign investigative agency. The girl had been contacted through games and social media platforms including Instagram and Discord, and was allegedly ordered to poison her pet cat before being pressured to harm herself. Investigators reached her before the second order was carried out. The inquiry now spans multiple IP addresses, with victims linked to four countries; no arrests have been announced.
The trace: from a foreign alert to a Karachi household
The case began with an intelligence alert, not a complaint. A foreign agency shared IP addresses linked to suspicious online activity, covering 13 countries including Pakistan, officials told Geo News. The NCCIA’s Karachi cybercrime team took the Pakistani address to the service provider and traced it to a household in Karachi. Tariq Nawaz, the NCCIA’s additional director who heads its Sindh region, told Arab News on Wednesday that the foreign agency had supplied the address and his team followed it through the provider to the home. Nawaz declined to identify the foreign agency. Investigators contacted the household and seized the devices the girl had been using.
The turning point: victim, not perpetrator
At first, the trail looked like it was leading to an offender. The team initially examined the Pakistani IP as part of its hunt for the people running the network, suspecting it might belong to an operator or a facilitator. Forensic analysis flipped that picture: the address belonged not to a predator but to an exploited child. That reversal turned a manhunt into a rescue: a routine IP trace can end at a victim’s door instead of a suspect’s. It also fits an agency working at a new pace: the NCCIA netted 1,129 cybercriminals in a single month in an October enforcement sweep.
What the girl was ordered to do
Nawaz told Arab News the girl had first been approached through interactive games and social media platforms, including Instagram and Discord. Those contacting her first got her to share photographs. Then came the orders: she was told to kill her pet cat, and once that had happened, the handlers used threats to publish her photos to push her toward harming herself. Geo News and The News report she was ordered to poison the cat, which died. Nawaz would not confirm whether she had complied with the later demands, saying only that she had been blackmailed and was now safe. All contact with the handlers was online.
What the “764” network is
The name 764 will be new to most Pakistani readers, but it is not new to investigators abroad. The network targets children through gaming and social media platforms, using threats to expose photographs to coerce victims into escalating harmful behaviour. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned that such groups operate internationally, exploiting children through sexual abuse, animal cruelty and self harm. The Karachi case lands in the middle of a global crackdown: earlier this month a man identified by US prosecutors as a senior 764 leader pleaded guilty to conspiring to sexually exploit children. Nawaz said victims linked to the network had been identified in Pakistan, the United States, Australia and Britain. Only days earlier, the AI-found PHP2Shell flaw put Pakistani websites on edge after attackers began probing servers days before the patch landed.
The blind spot at home
The parents knew nothing. Officials said they were unaware of her involvement until the NCCIA contacted them, and that they had noticed changes in her behaviour over the previous six months without connecting them to her online life. The network works through progressive pressure: first contact, then photographs, then an animal-cruelty order, then threats of exposure, then self harm. Each step gives the handlers more leverage. The platforms named are the same apps where millions of Pakistani teenagers spend their evenings.
What happens next
The investigation is widening, not closing. “Our investigation is running on different IPs. We are working on the identification of other victims,” Nawaz told Arab News. In Pakistan alone, one victim’s identity is confirmed and two more are being established. Investigators are examining the seized devices and working with international counterparts on digital leads. No arrests have been announced. This is the second time in two months that a tip from abroad has set the NCCIA in motion: in September an FBI alert led the agency to a 17-year-old in Bahawalpur accused of using an AI platform to research poisons. Officials have not linked the two cases, but the pattern, foreign intelligence in and a local doorstep out, is becoming standard practice. For continuing coverage, see more national news stories from Pakistan on PakMirror.
