‘He had a lot of profiles’: The rise of online drug-facilitated rape gangs

Published 3 August 2026 · india

Recent cases in several countries point to a worrying trend of men gathering on the internet to carry out sexual abuse crimes. Warning: This story

Recent cases in several countries point to a worrying trend of men gathering on the internet to carry out sexual abuse crimes. Warning: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault that some readers will find disturbing. Zoe Watts’s 16-year marriage to a man she met when she was 17 was abusive. But she had no idea of the depths of his mistreatment until one Sunday. “He sat me down one evening and told me what he was doing. I think he always had a thing for risky behaviour, and this was part of this cat-and-mouse game he was playing with me,” Watts told Al Jazeera from Devon, England. “It was quite tumultuous, but I didn’t know what he was doing to me.” Her husband admitted he was crushing sleeping pills into her tea and then taking advantage of her sedated state to take photos and videos. It was only later that she realised she had been raped. In 2022, her now-e husband was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment. “He had a lot of online profiles, and that’s where my images [went],” she said. In May, Watts and another survivor, Amanda Stanhope, launched a campaign, #EndEyeCheck, against drug-facilitated sexual assault and its online dissemination. A subgenre of pornography, in which one of the parties appears to be asleep or otherwise unconscious – possibly knocked out through drugs – caters to an atypical sexual interest known as somnophilia. While some of this is staged using professional or willing performers, some is not, and such videos include so-called “eye checks”: lifting the eyelid of the victim to confirm they are unconscious. “This type of cybercrime often falls under domestic or intimate-partner violence, which can obscure the other networks and actors that facilitate this kind of violence. Or chalking it up to an individual problem, a few bad apples rather than a series of systemic failures,” Emma Quilty, a research fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, told Al Jazeera.

“This is similar in some ways to other organised crimes which require platforms upon which to operate and profit, communication and rule enforcement, [as well as] entrenched belief systems [such as] misogyny.” What do we know about recent cases? A group of men was jailed in Germany for drugging and raping women, then sharing the footage in a Telegram group chat codenamed “Driving School”. The crimes mainly took place within the Chinese diaspora; Chinese men in Germany carried out the crimes, and Chinese women in Europe were most of the victims, although the phenomenon is by no means confined to any nationality or demographic. Britain’s Crime Agency (NCA) has recently identified 270 members of an international network organising drug-facilitated sexual assault, while Europol’s Project Medusa, which aims to combat drug-facilitated sexual assault, has identified 156 perpetrators and victims from another network. The phenomenon first received global attention in 2024 with the case of Gisele Pelicot in France. Over nearly a decade, Pelicot’s husband encouraged 72 other men to rape her while she was sedated, recruiting participants online. In March, an investigation by CNN exposed a so-called “rape academy” operating on a Telegram group named Zzz, and Motherless, a site boasting “where anything legal is hosted forever!” Members of this network discussed tactics, experiences and arranged assaults, in some instances inviting others to take part or paying for a livestream of the rape. A few members offered supplies of sleep-inducing drugs, for example zolpidem, commonly known by brand names such as Ambien. Footage of the assaults was shared via group chats and uploaded to sites like Motherless, CNN reported. Meanwhile, in the German “driving school” case, victims were blackmailed into further assaults under threat of having the footage shared. However, the messaging app and social media platform Telegram stands out as a tool for these networks, according to Quilty, owing to end-to-end encryption which enables anonymity. It has weak content moderation and allows users to pay for goods and services through an internal cryptocurrency system.