A quarter-billion-dollar crypto heist, a violent kidnapping, a network of teenage cybercriminals, and the rise of the Gen Z Mafia.
THREAT ACTORS
by Mitch Moxley & Johnny Liesman
Random House, Fall 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
Not too long ago, responsible adults worried that adolescents who spent hours playing video games like Grand Theft Auto were being indoctrinated into a world numbed to violence and misogyny. What flew under the radar were the late-night sessions on less violent multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox that primed kids for something just as unsettling. There, kids could learn to cheat, hack, and steal in online marketplaces selling “rare” usernames and game add-ons, earning an “education” that seamlessly propelled them into the higherstakes cryptocurrency world and hijacking digital wallets—sometimes in a matter of seconds. Threat Actors follows one such group of young men as they graduate from scripted phone scams into threats and beatings, and from “small” seven-figure thefts to the heist of a quarter billion dollars from an unsuspecting middle-aged investor. They are members of “the Com,” or “the Community,” a fast-growing online collective of young criminals trained at home and emerging as a brutal and organized 21st-century Mafia.
THREAT ACTORS (a term used by law enforcement and investigators to describe this growing class of cybercriminals) follows the group’s most notorious crime down every rabbit hole, revealing who the “threat actors” behind the senseless usernames are, examining how an anonymous young investigator on X helped the FBI unravel the mystery of their identities, and asking who’s really to blame for the conditions that guided them down the path to crime.
Mitch Moxley is a writer who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications. He is the co-creator, writer, and host of the podcast Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe (Audible Originals, October 2026), and author of the memoir Apologies to My Censor, about the six years he lived in China.
Johnny Liesman is a New York-based investigative journalist and producer who codeveloped and reported the Audible Originals series Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe and is producing an upcoming podcast hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow. He’s spent countless late nights in the Telegram channels of the Com—and grew up in the same online world as many of the book’s subjects.
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