August 1, 2026
Teenage hits, internet meltdowns
The teenage hitmen recruited to kill across Europe
Europe’s teen murder-for-cash scandal sparks fear, fury and grim jokes online
TLDR: Police say a Europe-wide crime group recruited teenagers online to carry out murders for cash, turning real violence into something that looked like a game. Commenters were horrified, mocking the grim business-speak, worrying this could trigger attacks on private messaging apps, and blaming drugs for pulling kids in.
The story itself is chilling enough: police say a crime network called Foxtrot has been hiring teenagers through social media to carry out killings across Europe, sometimes with instructions dressed up to feel like a video game mission. One 18-year-old killed the wrong man in Sweden. Another teenager was convicted in the UK over a planned hit. But in the comments, readers weren’t just horrified — they were also deeply rattled by how cheap, casual, and online this all seems to have become.
The biggest reaction was pure alarm. One commenter called it simply “Very concerning,” then jumped straight to the next fear: that because criminals used Signal, politicians in Europe may use this case to push surveillance or even attack private messaging apps. That sparked the classic online panic: not just crime is bad, but what freedoms get hit next? Another comment groaned at the term “violence-as-a-service”, basically saying the corporate-sounding label was so bleak it made them sad — and honestly, that little phrase became the thread’s accidental villain. Readers seemed disgusted that murder was being described like food delivery or software.
Then came the darkly practical angle: one person pointed to youth drug addiction as the real engine behind the whole nightmare, arguing that easy online access to drugs is pulling kids into crime long before gangs do. And in true internet fashion, amid all the horror, someone still managed to complain that the article was paywalled — because apparently even Europe’s teen hitman crisis can’t escape the eternal comment-section battle over subscriptions.
Key Points
- •The article says the Foxtrot Network has been linked to about 35 murders since 2022 and to attacks or attempted attacks on Israeli targets in Europe.
- •According to Europol’s Operational Taskforce GRIMM, teenagers are recruited through social media and given instructions in a gamified format resembling computer games.
- •Europol official Andy Kraag described the model as the calculated outsourcing of murder to vulnerable young people.
- •Police believe some Foxtrot attacks were carried out for the Iranian regime after leader Rawa Majid relocated to Tehran, while others were tied to drug turf wars.
- •The case of Norwegian teenager Johannes Natland is presented as an example of how Foxtrot-linked recruiters allegedly move young people from online contact to cross-border murder plots.