Thanks, Internet! It’s now shockingly easy to become an international monkey torturer.

In 2017, the Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer Philip Colt Moss was facing felony drug charges after a raid on his townhome turned up marijuana, hash, OxyContin, Klonopin, Xanax, zolpidem (the active ingredient in Ambien), and "four pills that contained methylphenidate" (the active ingredient in Ritalin). The cops found enough material that they charged Moss as a drug dealer, but Moss' lawyer told the Des Moines Register that his client was simply someone who "needs help." Moss had stepped aside from his work as an attorney and "checked into an eight-week inpatient treatment facility outside of Iowa," the paper reported at the time. "Hopefully common sense will prevail," said Moss' lawyer. "He needs help. He’s getting help, and he was not dealing drugs."

Moss eventually pled guilty to a pair of misdemeanors and "two felony counts of failure to possess a tax stamp." He got two years' probation. Moss started his own law firm after all this blew over, so perhaps things were turning around for him. But a few years later, he found himself caught up in a new investigation—a quite serious federal investigation—by the FBI and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Both agencies were extremely interested in his Internet activity on Telegram and WhatsApp. They say that the Internet offers a gathering place for every interest, no matter how niche, and that extends even to the darkest corners of the human psyche. That was certainly true here. The government was investigating a scheme in which US citizens were gathering in a "private online group and one-on-one chats on encrypted messaging applications" to share their fantasies about making "monkey crush" videos. The name actually makes these videos sound more innocuous than they are. While crushing a monkey to death would be terrible enough, the "clients" in this private online group wanted to watch monkeys tortured for hours. They complained when the monkeys died too quickly. They suggested dressing baby monkeys in diapers and yellow outfits, then feeding them with bottles in front of their parents—before brutally breaking bones, severing limbs, inflicting pain with fishhooks and pliers and skewers, burning wounds with lighters, gluing various bodily orifices closed, attacking them with snakes, and sexually abusing them. And it was all actually done. In a truly heinous example of global, Internet-based outsourcing, the "client ideas" were funneled to an unnamed minor in Indonesia, who, for a few hundred US dollars sent via Western Union, would procure the monkeys, film their torture, and send the videos back to the Americans. As part of this investigation, the government came across Telegram messages allegedly sent from Philip Colt Moss to the ringleader of one such "monkey crush" group. The messages suggested that rehab hadn't quite stuck. "I got whatever. You need. I got a hookup for anything you’re looking for. Uppers downers. Girls. Lol," said one message from Moss in 2023. "From weed to mushrooms. Coke to meth. Molly to acid. Dope to tar. Xanax. You gotta remember as a defense attorney. I know all the dealers bc I represent them." The two men kicked around plans to meet up in Chicago and "get wild in the city." But after Moss shared a picture of his fiancé, the conversation turned back to monkey videos. "Do u tell her about the whole monkey shit?" asked the ringleader. "Man I try to cuz she's a cool ass girl and she's a party girl," came the response. "She doesn't really get the monkey thing which. Makes sense but she likes that it's a little community and it seems to make me happy." The happiness presumably wore off, though, when Moss was arrested on August 8, 2024. The indictment against Moss was unsealed late last week by the Department of Justice, and Moss now faces the possibility of years in federal prison.

The crackdown

The community of monkey torture lovers might be "little," but it's larger than you might expect, with some distributors making hundreds of video sales. The government spent the last year trying to crack down on the market and has made numerous arrests. In December 2023, for instance, a Wisconsin man was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for nearly the same scheme. Kenneth Herrera "paid a videographer in Indonesia $100 for a video of a monkey being physically abused" and provided "specific instructions, which the videographer followed, asking that the monkey" be tortured in ways we aren't going to list here. An "encrypted messaging application" was used to distribute the resulting video. In April 2024, a Virginia man pled guilty to administering a "private online chat group" related to monkey torture. Michael Macartney "received over 300 electronic payments from co-conspirators for the purposes of promoting, creating, obtaining, receiving, and distributing the torture videos. On one occasion, Macartney raised additional funds for a bonus payment to a videographer who, at the request of the co-conspirators and on short notice, created a video of a [juvenile] monkey being tortured with a jar of ants, leading to the monkey’s death." Macartney claimed to have 2,300 videos for sale online and personally possessed "at least 500 videos depicting animal crushing." In May, an Ohio man pled guilty to "creating and distributing videos depicting acts of extreme violence and sexual abuse against monkeys." The man had "used encrypted chat apps to direct money to individuals in Indonesia willing to commit the requested acts of torture on camera." In addition, the Ohio man had mailed a thumb drive "containing 64 videos of monkey torture to a co-conspirator in Wisconsin."

Everyone’s a critic

But it wasn't until June that the government arrested the alleged ringleader of Philip Colt Moss' group—an Ohio man named Nicholas Dryden. Dryden was said to oversee video production for his group; he, like many others in this world, had a contact in Indonesia who made the videos. (Because the Indonesian in this case was a minor, Dryden has also been charged with "receipt of a visual depiction of the sexual abuse of children because a minor was paid to abuse the monkeys.") Dryden allegedly arranged payment details through WhatsApp. He also took payments from "clients" and handled distribution of the videos, sometimes offering discounts to repeat clients. To make sure clients knew that this was new and authentic material, Dryden had his Indonesian videographer hold up a piece of paper with Dryden's screen name written on it at the start of the videos. Dryden does not appear to have been an ace at Internet security, even though he clearly knew he should have been more careful about payment and communication. "If you have your ID, there is 300 dollars waiting for you at the Western Union near you," Dryden allegedly wrote to his Indonesian videographer on WhatsApp in 2023. "I should give you the tracking [number]." "Listen. I'm new at this too," he added later. "I don't feel good knowing this bank account is tied to our government's [sic] name." "Just be honest with you, bro," he wrote, "we should use bitcoin or something like that since from the beginning, this shit is not the most legal thing." Dryden is alleged to have set up a private group called "Famiglia Privata" on Telegram as a gathering place for his fellow aficionados. As for vetting new clients, Dryden is said to have written, "I just go with my gut. But I usually ask em a series of questions. Then I say, you have 2 minutes to screenshot your gallery and show me what torture videos you have downloaded." His clients could be demanding—they had both requests and deadlines, which Dryden allegedly passed along.

DRYDEN: Can you get a very small long tail [monkey] today? The smallest one that you could find.
VIDEOGRAPHER: I'll find it for you today.
DRYDEN: And for some reason customers want you to put diapers on a monkey. I don't like this customer, but he pays well... Get the smallest diapers you can find. This customer is the best. He pays the most. So, it will be good to do what he says. He also sent me some ideas too.

The clients could also be critical. When Dryden showed them new monkey torture videos, he routinely got feedback such as "I gotta say, wasn't one of [the videographer's] best ones. He spent too much time with the diaper problem. He did beat the shit out of it tho." And clients regularly pushed for more extreme videos. Dryden himself admitted that there were certain torture sequences he couldn't watch, writing to one complaining client, "Sorry brother I really thought he did [a really disturbing thing]. I turned my head an skipped that part that shit makes [me] queezy [sic] I should have made sure before I said that."

The banality of evil

The recent arrest in Paris of Telegram's chief executive, Pavel Durov, was apparently due to Telegram's unwillingness to help French investigators stop a brazen series of illicit online activities, many of which flourish on services like Telegram and WhatsApp. The monkey crush cases are a reminder of the reality of that claim—these services are indeed where illicit business goes to get done. On the other hand, governments often stress the "encrypted" nature of many of these communication tools, or they lament a lack of desired cooperation when investigating cases. The monkey crush cases also show how plenty of evidence, including Telegram and WhatsApp messages, can still be gathered today and that cases can still be charged. (Though it's possible that only the less technically savvy get caught and that, by definition, we have little idea of just what the technically astute criminals get up to on these platforms.) In the end, though, what's remarkable about the monkey crush story is just how quickly and easily the basic tools of modern digital life—thumb drives, digital video, global money transfers, outsourcing, encryption, Telegram, WhatsApp—helped random Middle Americans become international monkey-torturing criminals. Unlike in the old days, nothing special was required here—no deep technical knowledge, no expensive tools—to create a global network of pain for the voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure of others in this "little community." Technology has truly lowered the barriers. In doing so, it asks even more of us as moral actors who now have fewer external hindrances to pursuing even our basest desires within communities that actively cheer them on. But if we fail that test, at least there's the Fish and Wildlife Service.