A calm honor Student who recently graduated from the Immaculate High School in Danbury, Veer Chetal was about to study at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022 he completed a program 'Future Lawyers', and a story that year on the Immaculate website showed a photo of a smiling child with glasses with a Tommy Hilfiger -Windjager over a red polo.
Classmates remember Chetal as shy and a fan of cars. “He just loved himself a bit,” says Marco Dias, who became friends with the Junior year of Chetal. According to another classmate named Nick Paris, this was true for Chetal until a day in the middle of his last year, when he showed up at school with a Corvette. “He just parked in the lot. It was 7:30 am, and everyone was like, What? “Paris says. Soon is chetal rolled up in a BMW and then a Lamborghini Urus.
Chetal said he had made his money to act crypto; Dias says that one morning Chetal showed him transactions on his phone during the homeroma class as proof. Once Chetal rented a big house in Stamford, Conn., And organized a three -day meeting with friends. “At one point I was in the basement, and I was just messing around with my friends, and I just see him, just like on the couch, just like on his phone, almost everyone at the party avoid,” says Dias. “And I thought, oh, that's a bit weird.” Paris remembers that the police stopped in his Lamborghini Urus for a traffic violation during a Chetal school parade. “He literally called his lawyer on the spot before he answered the questions of the police, who was everyone: wow, this guy has something for him. Like, this guy has serious money.”
Independent researchers say that Chetal was secretly a member of the COM, also known as the Community, an online network of chat groups that has its roots in the Hacking -Underground of the 1980s and functions as a kind of social network for cyber criminals or aspiring. In a statement from a non -related case, an FBI agent described the COM as “a geographically diverse group of individuals, organized in different subgroups, all coordinating through online communication applications such as Discord and Telegram to perform different types of criminal activities.” According to the FBI -required statement and experts who study the COM, include the activities of the various subgroups SWLAMT, which involves false reports to emergency services or institutions such as schools to activate a police response; SIM swapping, when hackers take over the telephone number of a target, sometimes by misleading representatives of customer service; Ransomware attacks, using a malware that refuses users or organizers access to computer files; Cryptocurrency theft; And business intrusions.
Allison Nixon, the Chief Research Officer of Unit 221B, a collective of cyber security experts, has been following this growing corner of the internet since 2011 and is generally considered a prominent expert in the COM. She says that most com -members are young men from Western countries. In group exchange, many talk about the university and follow lessons in cyber security, which they use to their advantage, she says. The gateway for many is via video games such as Runescape, Roblox and Grand Theft Auto.
