Dad stuck in support nightmare after teen lied about age on Discord
arstechnica.com
Data dump confirms dad's suspicions that Discord knew teen's age prior to hack.

In short, a kid made a Discord account at age 12, lied about her age and said she was 18. The kid at age 13 clicked a scam link claiming to be Discord support and lost access to her account. Scammer asked for parents bank account details which is how the dad became aware. Dad tried to report the issue to Discord, but had to go through an AI support bot that kept closing the ticket. Dad spoke with someone named “Molly” that was possibly a human and explained that his daughter’s account had a lot of underage friends tied to the account that could be at risk. “Molly” said they’d have to open a ticket from within the app, which they no longer had access to because his daughter never set up 2FA.

Discord didn’t actually do anything about this until Ars stepped in. After regaining access to the account the daughter found 2 friends fell for the scam. Discord later banned the account for violating the TOS when lying about her age and stated they would only restore the account if they shared a photo of the kid along with a copy of her birth certificate or passport. The father gave in and complied so she didn’t lose access to her friends.

  • cannedtuna@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    100·
    3 hours ago

    Asked for comment, a Discord spokesperson told Ars that the platform “takes situations like this seriously, especially when they involve teens and account security.”

    More like Discord only takes these things seriously when an article drags them. Probably only banned the kids account because she dropped this on them and they handled it badly.

    Crazy how far this company has fallen, but that’s expected I guess when $$$ are on the line.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
      223·
      2 hours ago

      The company has fallen? From where? Discord was bottom of the barrel for as long as I can remember.

      • chisel@piefed.socialEnglish
        101·
        2 hours ago

        For the first few years, when it had no profit motive, no way to earn money, and was just willingly bleeding cash to gain market share, it was great! That is the first stage of enshittification and they are now on to stage 2: making the platform good for the real target audience, advertisers.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
      816·
      3 hours ago

      The company has always been shit run by shitty people.

      Never trust a tech worker, they decided long ago to sell out the species and the planet.

      • neatchee@piefed.socialEnglish
        233·
        2 hours ago

        “Never trust a tech worker” they said, using a device designed by a tech worker, running software designed by a tech worker, accessing servers maintained by a tech worker, on a hosting service implemented and managed by tech workers, through an internet service provider employing tech workers galore.

        • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nzEnglish
          41·
          1 hour ago

          It makes more sense when they say ‘tech worker’ you read it as ‘magical internet executive’

  • RiskableEnglish
    30·
    3 hours ago

    The real question: Why didn’t she just make a new Discord account? It’s free and stupidly easy.

    It’s not that hard to contact your old friends and tell them your account for hacked. In fact, that happens all the time.

    • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 hours ago

      I assume these are internet friends, otherwise yeah just talk at school and discuss the scam over phone or whatever.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      5·
      2 hours ago

      There’s been a spate of Discord-based hacking attempts lately, two of my friends have had to do this. They can’t get their old accounts back, Discord is basically just ignoring them. Starting new accounts is easy.

      The hard part is that they also lost their gmail accounts, that’s a lot more important for most people to be able to recover. I recommend everyone with a gmail account do the “create an emergency recovery code” thing, print it out and store it somewhere safely off anything digital.

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    16·
    2 hours ago

    Frey told Ars he was shocked to see a platform as big as Discord relying on such poor support infrastructure.

    It’s exactly what we can expect from tech companies these days.

  • phx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    3 hours ago

    I’m rather suspicious of this story given the timing and the increase of “we need online ID to protect the children” narratives being pushed by various government

  • je_skirata@lemmy.todayEnglish
    24·
    3 hours ago

    Discord later banned the account for violating the TOS when lying about her age and stated they would only restore the account if they shared a photo of the kid along with a copy of her birth certificate or passport. The father gave in and complied so she didn’t loose access to her friends.

    This is valid on Discord’s part. The father should have helped her to make a new account instead of giving away records if he’s really insistent on letting his kid have Discord. Also, “loose”