Australian girls are being targeted online by sadistic young men, who treat their victims as if they were characters in a video game, the new head of the Australian Federal Police has revealed.

Commissioner Krissy Barrett said online criminal networks are intimidating, exploiting and controlling girls with low self-esteem or mental health disorders to perform serious acts of violence on themselves, siblings, others and pets.

They have identified 59 people as being part of the network in Australia and arrested three people aged between 17 and 20.

"They are crimefluencers, and are motivated by anarchy and hurting others, with most of their victims pre-teen or teenage girls," Barrett told the National Press Club in her first major speech. 

Barrett said young men from Western, English-

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