A Notable Achievement Veer Chetal, a quiet honor student, recently graduated from Immaculate High School in Danbury and is set to start his studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022, he participated in a “future lawyers” program, and a feature on the Immaculate website featured a picture of him beaming in glasses while wearing a Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker over a red polo shirt.
Classmates remember Chetal as reserved and passionate about cars. “He mainly kept to himself,” recalls Marco Dias, who became friends with Chetal during their junior year. Another peer, Nick Paris, noted that Chetal was quite introverted until one day halfway through senior year when he arrived at school in a Corvette. “He parked in the lot at 7:30 a.m., and everyone was like, What?” Paris shares. Shortly after, Chetal also turned up in a BMW and then a Lamborghini Urus. He began sporting Louis Vuitton shirts and Gucci shoes, and on Senior Skip Day, when Paris and others went to a local mall, Chetal took a group of friends, including Dias, to New York for a yacht party he had rented, where they were photographed with large sums of cash.
Chetal claimed to have earned his money through cryptocurrency trading; Dias mentioned that Chetal demonstrated his trades on his phone one morning during homeroom. On one occasion, Chetal rented a big house in Stamford, Conn., and organized a three-day party with friends. “I was in the basement having fun with my friends when I noticed him sitting on the couch on his phone, pretty much avoiding everyone,” Dias recalls. “I thought, Oh, that’s a bit odd.” Paris also remembers how, during a school parade, the police stopped Chetal in his Lamborghini Urus for a traffic violation. “He actually called his lawyer right there before speaking to the police, which made everyone go: Wow, this guy’s really got something going for him. He’s got serious money.”
Independent investigations reveal that Chetal was covertly involved with the Com, also known as the Comm or the Community, an online network originating from the hacking scene of the 1980s, serving as a social platform for criminals or those wishing to be. An affidavit from an unrelated case describes the Com as “a diverse group united in various subgroups, all communicating online through apps like Discord and Telegram to engage in different criminal activities.” As stated in the F.B.I. affidavit and by experts studying the Com, activities in these subgroups include swatting—making false emergency reports to provoke a police response; SIM swapping, where hackers gain control of a target’s phone number by deceiving customer service agents; ransomware attacks, using malware to lock users out of their files; cryptocurrency theft; and corporate infiltrations.
Allison Nixon, chief research officer of Unit 221B, a group of cybersecurity professionals, has closely monitored this emerging area of the internet since 2011 and is considered a leading expert on the Com. She states that most members come from Western countries and are mainly young men. In group chats, many discuss college and cybersecurity classes, which they leverage for their pursuits. For many, entry into this world begins with video games like RuneScape, Roblox, and Grand Theft Auto.
