From joyrides to assault, ‘crimefluencer’ networks are coercing young people into breaking the law
- Written by The Conversation
You have probably never heard the term “crimefluencer”.
These are members of decentralised online crime networks who take crime content and amplify it to build notoriety and status in their online communities.
They also recruit content creators to film themselves or others committing crimes, with the vision shared across social media, forums, or messaging apps.
Late last year, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) set up a taskforce to “identify, disrupt and dismantle those online ecosystems that target Australians”.
So, what exactly is happening, how bad is the problem, and what are some possible solutions?
What is a decentralised online crime network?
A decentralised online crime network is not a single organised crime group, but a loose collection of people and small online communities who are connected through shared interests and platforms.
They don’t have clear leaders or formal membership. Instead, people and sub-groups interact across social media such as TikTok, forums, and messaging apps like Snapchat, often anonymously.
The AFP states members of these networks are “typically young males from English-speaking countries with common beliefs on violent extremism, nihilism, Nazism, satanism and sadism”.
These networks have been responsible for numerous online crimes, including the production of violent extremist material and the exploitation of young people, predominantly young girls. Known as “post and boast” activities, crimes range from joyriding through to serious physical assaults.
The AFP states victims are often “coerced online into performing explicit and violent acts on themselves, siblings, others or their pets”.
The crimefluencers then take this content and remix or amplify it to gain attention, followers, or status online.
States and territories are beginning to recognise the dangers. Laws have been established in Western Australia where crimefluencers could face up to three years in prison for glorifying violent acts, and Queensland has laid charges against more than 200 people under similar laws.
Queensland has cracked down on ‘posting and boasting’ crime.The online recruitment process
Crimefluencers recruit content creators through gaming platforms such as Roblox as well as messaging apps such as Discord and Telegram. They hunt for targets – often a young, vulnerable child or teenager, or those with mental health conditions – whom they encourage to create content for them to distribute.
The more depraved, the more they have to gain in their online communities. Violence is a form of currency.
Unlike traditional true crime creators – who analyse or retell events after the fact – crimefluencers are participants in the crime cycle itself. They do not just document harm, they incentivise, reward and sometimes orchestrate it.
Young people are easily targeted
Revealing Reality, a consultancy and research agency in the United Kingdom, analysed Roblox, a gaming platform popular among young people, and found:
adults and children are free to interact with no meaningful age verification
sexualised environments are accessible to accounts registered to users as young as nine years old
safety measures can be circumvented with simple workarounds
private (or relatively private) conversations between strangers of all ages are normalised
content rating systems fail to accurately reflect the nature of experiences
there are opportunities for potentially predatory behaviour through private spaces and off-platform communication.
The eSafety Commission is also working to address emerging risks, including to young people on Roblox.
But this is a rapidly changing space with multiple platforms implicated, including TikToK, Snapchat, Discord, Telegram and Kick.
Why young people are vulnerable to manipulation
Young people are particularly susceptible to these dynamics as they are more likely to prioritise social validation over long-term consequences especially in environments where harm is normalised, reinforced and rewarded.
This is because their stage of brain development is primed for reward-seeking and peer approval.
In some cases the same young person coerced into producing harmful content is later encouraged to recruit others, blurring the line between victim and perpetrator in ways that complicate both policing and support responses.
For the young people involved, the consequences are significant. Content can be reshared indefinitely, criminal charges may follow and the digital record of their involvement, whether coerced or not, can shape education, employment and relationships for years to come.
These vulnerabilities are actively exploited by crimefluencers. As a result, effective responses must directly target these mechanisms, rather than focusing solely on individual behaviour.
What is the solution?
To disrupt the reward-seeking, peer validation and coercive dynamics outlined above, a number of interventions are needed.
Firstly, at a platform-level, it’s crucial the visibility of harmful content is downranked, reduced, or removed entirely, as well as hiding the metrics to remove the reward element.
Secondly, the coercive control dynamics the crimefluencers develop need to be interrupted. Users being targeted should have access to a one-click account lockdown, evidence capture, and reporting mechanism.
There should also be silent help options to assist vulnerable young people, including quick exit features and disguised support links.
Thirdly, we need to de-glamorise crimefluencing and instead highlight consequences and show victim impact. Young voices are important here, so peer-led campaigns would be really powerful.
Fourthly, language pattern recognition models could be used to identify grooming-style escalation, similar to child exploitation methods. The AFP is already working on an AI tool to better understand the language used by these networks as crimefluencers often use slang and emojis to communicate.
If we are going to tackle this issue before it gets worse, authorities must focus on identifying and pursuing the amplifiers and organisers, not solely the young people who are often as much a victim as a perpetrator.
