Terrorgram Collective: Attacks, Prosecutions, and Collapse

The Terrorgram Collective is a transnational white supremacist network that operated through the encrypted messaging platform Telegram, producing propaganda that glorified mass killers and soliciting attacks on minorities, officials, and critical infrastructure. Coordinated arrests, prosecutions, and terrorist designations in four countries have since gutted its leadership and sharply reduced its output, though its publications still circulate on successor platforms.

What the Group Was

The network took shape in 2019, when white supremacists banned from Facebook and Twitter migrated to Telegram. Two figures are credited as its architects: Pavol Beňadik, a Slovak national who used the handle “Slovakbro,” and Matthew Althorpe, a Canadian who went by “Terrorwave Refined.” That summer, the pair began circulating flyers for a community of just seven accounts. By 2021 the loose community had coalesced into the Terrorgram Collective, an inner circle of propagandists spanning at least eight members across five countries.¹

Its ideology was militant accelerationism: the belief that violence and sabotage should be used to collapse modern society and clear the way for a white ethnostate. Propaganda demonized Jewish people, Muslims, people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals, and explicitly encouraged lone-actor attacks on both people and infrastructure such as power grids, telecommunications systems, and oil pipelines.²

A central radicalization tactic was “saints culture.” Propagandists produced trading-card graphics listing past far-right killers and their victim counts, published calendars marking attack anniversaries and attackers’ birthdays, and urged followers to emulate them in the hope of similar veneration.³ The practice drew on the veneration of the March 2019 Christchurch mosque attacker and earlier accelerationist spaces such as Iron March and Fascist Forge.⁴

Between June 2021 and October 2022, the Collective released four major publications and a documentary:

Militant Accelerationism (June 2021), a 136-page handbook that characterized terror as “the language of the unheard.”
Do It For The Gram (December 2021), a 268-page collection of written calls to violence.
The Hard Reset (July 2022), a 261-page manual with detailed bomb-making and infrastructure sabotage instructions.
White Terror (October 2022), a 24-minute documentary celebrating more than 100 attackers, narrated by Dallas Humber, later identified as a U.S.-based leader of the group.²

Law enforcement has treated possession of these materials as a signal that an individual may be in a late stage on the pathway toward carrying out an attack.²

Attacks and Plots Tied to the Network

The most prominent attack linked to the Collective is the October 12, 2022 shooting at Tepláreň, an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia. The gunman, 19-year-old Juraj Krajčík, killed two people and wounded a third before dying by suicide. He had been radicalized through Terrorgram channels beginning at age 16 and was mentored for three years by Beňadik and Humber. His 65-page manifesto thanked the Terrorgram Collective for its “practical guides” and praised Beňadik by name.⁵ After the attack, Terrorgram influencers celebrated Krajčík as a “saint” and circulated his manifesto along with crime scene images.⁶

Other attacks and plots connected to the network include a shooting at two schools in Aracruz, Brazil that killed four people and wounded eleven; an August 2024 stabbing near a mosque in Eskişehir, Turkey that wounded five; a foiled July 2024 plot against an energy facility in East Brunswick, New Jersey; a 2024 attempted attack on an energy facility in Nashville, Tennessee, where the perpetrator pleaded guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction; and an attempted assassination of an Australian official.⁷

Terrorgram material also surfaced in the federal prosecution of Brandon Russell, founder of the Atomwaffen Division, who was convicted in February 2025 of conspiring to blow up power stations in Baltimore. Prosecutors showed that Russell had posted about attacking electrical substations in Terrorgram channels and had distributed The Hard Reset.⁸

Who Has Been Prosecuted

Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison (United States)

On September 6, 2024, the FBI arrested Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho. A 15-count indictment unsealed days later charged both with conspiracy, soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, distributing bomb-making instructions, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Each faced up to 220 years in prison if convicted on all charges.⁹

Humber pleaded guilty on August 8, 2025, admitting that from July 2022 to September 2024 she had solicited hate crimes, solicited the murder of federal officials, and conspired to provide material support to terrorists.⁷ On December 17, 2025, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins in the Eastern District of California sentenced her to 30 years in federal prison. Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg said Humber had, “from the comfort of her suburban California home,” used online platforms “to celebrate violence and solicit attacks that took the lives of innocent people and injured others around the world.”¹⁰

Allison has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody after a judge denied bail. As of early 2025, his defense team planned to fight the case on First Amendment grounds, arguing that his online activity was protected speech.¹¹

Noah Lamb and Alexander Lightner (United States)

In July 2025, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of California indicted Noah Lamb, 24, on eight counts including conspiracy, soliciting the murder of federal officials, doxing federal officials, and threatening communications. Prosecutors alleged that between November 2021 and September 2024, Lamb worked with the Collective to build a hit list of “high-value targets” including a U.S. senator, a federal judge, and a former U.S. attorney general. He faces up to 85 years in prison if convicted on all counts.¹²

Alexander Lightner, identified as a member of the Collective, was sentenced to 51 months in prison in June 2025 for possessing an unregistered firearm. The FBI had recovered a copy of Militant Accelerationism when he was arrested in Florida in January 2024 for threatening a mass shooting.⁴

Pavol Beňadik (Slovakia)

Beňadik, the Slovak co-founder who mentored the Bratislava shooter, was arrested in Slovakia in May 2022 using information provided by the FBI. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison.¹ During the investigation he initially denied knowing Krajčík, a claim later disproven by recovered chat records showing years of communication between them.⁶

Matthew Althorpe (Canada)

Althorpe, the Canadian co-founder, was arrested in 2023 and pleaded guilty in Ontario Superior Court of Justice to three terrorism charges: facilitating a terrorist activity, instructing others to carry out a terrorist activity, and committing an indictable offence for a terrorist group by willfully promoting hatred. On March 27, 2026, Justice Jane Kelly sentenced him to 20 years in prison. She found that his propaganda had inspired at least six terrorist attacks, including the Bratislava shooting and the 2024 mosque stabbing in Turkey, and noted that without the guilty plea he likely would have faced a life sentence.¹³¹⁴

Jeremy Meilhac (Denmark)

In April 2026, the District Court in Glostrup, Denmark sentenced Jeremy Meilhac, a 30-year-old Danish-French national, to six years in prison for promoting right-wing extremist terrorism. The court found that he held a “significant role” in the network, including collaborating with Humber to produce “saint cards” and sharing audio recordings of an attacker’s manifesto. Meilhac has appealed to Denmark’s High Court.¹⁵¹⁶

Terrorist Designations

Four countries have formally designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization.

The United Kingdom proscribed the group on April 26, 2024, under the Terrorism Act 2000, the first time an online-only terror network was proscribed as an organization under British law. Membership, support, or display of articles associated with the network became criminal offences punishable by up to 14 years in prison. It was the 81st organization and the sixth extreme right-wing group proscribed in the UK. Jonathan Hall, the UK Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said the proscription’s main practical value lay in forcing tech platforms to remove branded Terrorgram content, since proving membership in a network with no formal enrollment is extremely difficult.¹⁷

On January 13, 2025, the U.S. State Department designated the Collective and three of its international leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order 13224. The three were Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira, a Brazilian national and channel administrator; Noah Licul, a Croatian national and senior member; and Hendrik-Wahl Muller, a South African national and channel administrator. The designation froze any U.S.-jurisdiction assets of the group or these individuals and barred U.S. persons from transacting with them.¹⁸

Australia imposed counter-terrorism financing sanctions on the group in February 2025 under the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945, then formally listed it as a terrorist organization on June 27, 2025 under the Criminal Code Act 1995. Offences including membership, recruitment, training, and providing funds or support to the group carry penalties of up to 25 years in prison.¹⁹ Canada has also designated the group as a terrorist entity.²⁰

Why the Network Collapsed

Telegram’s hands-off moderation allowed the network to grow from a handful of accounts in 2019 to hundreds of channels and group chats. When specific channels were deleted, users replaced them with near-identical copies, and the Collective used custom bots to funnel extremist content into mainstream right-wing channels with tens of thousands of subscribers.¹²¹

That changed in 2024. After the August 2024 arrest of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov in France, the platform pledged greater cooperation with authorities and began using AI and roughly 750 contractors to proactively moderate public content.¹ Combined with the arrests of key leaders, the pressure produced a steep drop in output. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that neo-Nazi accelerationist posts fell by about 72% between August and November 2024, and many Terrorgram chats closed voluntarily.²²

What Remains

The network has not vanished. Analysts have observed remaining adherents moving to other platforms, including X, where content restrictions are looser.¹ By mid-2025 a new forum called FashFront had emerged as a self-styled successor to earlier accelerationist hubs. As of May 2026 it had roughly 940 registered users, including former members of the defunct Iron March forum, and continued to host accelerationist propaganda and recruitment despite frequent outages and leadership changes.²³ The Terrorgram Collective’s publications remain widely shared on these successor platforms even as the organization that produced them has largely collapsed.⁴

1
ProPublica. Rise and Fall of Terrorgram
2
ACC Research. Terrorgram’s Propaganda: An Overview of Publications
3
GNET Research. The Lineage of Violence: Saints Culture and Militant Accelerationist Terrorism
4
Anti-Defamation League. Terrorgram Collective: International Terrorists Promoting Violence and White Supremacy
5
ProPublica. Terrorgram Collective and the Bratislava Murders
6
VSquare. Terrorgram Far-Right Extremism and the Tepláreň Terrorist Attack
7
U.S. Department of Justice. Leader of Transnational Terrorist Group Pleads Guilty
8
The Guardian. Brandon Russell Neo-Nazi Bomb Plot Trial
9
U.S. Department of Justice. Leaders of Transnational Terrorist Group Charged
10
U.S. Department of Justice. Leader of Transnational Terrorist Group Sentenced to 30 Years
11
ProPublica. Matthew Allison and the Terrorgram Collective
12
U.S. Department of Justice. Member of Transnational Terrorist Group Charged With Soliciting Murder
13
Global News. Matthew Althorpe Sentencing
14
Public Prosecution Service of Canada. Althorpe Sentenced for Terrorism
15
Copenhagen Post. Dane Had Extensive Contact With Terror Network Leader
16
Europol. Terrorgram Network Dealt Another Blow as Member Sentenced in Denmark
17
VOX-Pol. The Proscription of Terrorgram as a Terrorist Organisation in the UK
18
U.S. Department of State. Terrorist Designations of the Terrorgram Collective and Three Leaders
19
Australian Minister for Home Affairs. Terrorgram Listed as Terrorist Organisation
20
Europol. Intelligence to Conviction: Europol Helps Dismantle Terrorgram Collective
21
Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Beyond the Collective: Understanding Terrorgram’s Efforts to Infiltrate the Mainstream on Telegram
22
Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Dismantling Digital Terror: Lessons Learned From the Collapse of Terrorgram
23
Global Extremism. Fash Front