From 2024 to 2025, international and Chinese-language media repeatedly reported on online cat-abuse groups and cruelty-video trading networks connected to China. Investigations described perpetrators using platforms such as Telegram and QQ to communicate, distribute, or sell videos of cat abuse, with coded language used to evade moderation. Stray cats, cats visible on street-cat cameras, internet-famous cats, and cats obtained through false adoption were among the reported targets.

Reports by the BBC, CNN, and Initium Media frame this not as a single isolated incident but as a public pattern involving viewers, paying customers, creators, distributors, and anti-abuse volunteers. Groups such as Feline Guardians and independent volunteers have tried to identify visual clues, preserve evidence, report accounts to platforms and law enforcement, and help rescue cats.

This archive does not repeat methods of abuse or reproduce cruelty footage. It records three public facts: online harm can become a tradeable media product and group identity; the victims are often stray or community cats with little protection; and civilian rescuers bear substantial investigative, reporting, and rescue costs where institutional protection is limited.

Because the public record concerns cross-platform and cross-regional networks, this entry is filed as a thematic harm archive rather than a single-perpetrator case. If later court records, platform findings, or verified individual cases become available, they should be archived separately and linked back to this entry.

Sources and Image Note

• BBC investigation into online cat-abuse groups
• CNN: The secret war between cat lovers and the abusers who profit from cruelty
• Initium Media report on cat-abuse culture and online groups
• Wikipedia: Street cats in China, public-source index and image sources
• Wikimedia Commons: Feral cat in Beijing01.JPG
• Wikimedia Commons: Feline Guardians poster.png