Technology@lemmy.worldbycannedtuna@lemmy.world
1 day

Dad stuck in support nightmare after teen lied about age on Discord- Ars Technica

arstechnica.com English

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.

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    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.
    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2 hours

      Ditch Discord. If your friends after all these years haven’t set up OOB contact, they’re not friends.

        • LaggyKar@programming.devEnglish
          47 minutes

          Out-of-band, I think. I.e. some other means of communication that doesn’t go via the same route they normally use.

        • bfg9k@lemmy.worldEnglish
          51 minutes

          Out Of Band, i.e. an alternate method to communicate that is separate to the normal method

    • HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      4 hours

      I’d of told my kid they are SOL and to learn from their fuck up. Go make a new account kiddo, ask your friends for their discords when you go back to class.

      • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1 hour

        I’d of told my kid

        What does it mean to “of tell” someone something?

      • Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        People make real friends online. Who they don’t know in person. You’d be telling your child to toughen up and get new friends.

        • Badargel@thelemmy.clubEnglish
          3 hours

          Ever had to move when you were a kid? Kids have to make new friends all the time. So do adults. Being forced to make new friends because of your own mistakes is part of life. You talk about it like it’s abuse.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      19 hours

      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 guy who applies for the “looking at pictures of little girls” position at discord needs to be on every single list

    • cannedtuna@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      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
        1 day

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

        • chisel@piefed.socialEnglish
          24 hours

          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.

          • GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            3 hours

            It’s so fucked up that companies with too much capital to burn can just bleed money for years in order to starve the competition out and establish a monopoly.

          • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
            12 hours

            Few years? Nah man. Maybe the first few months but they were already laying the foundation 10 years ago by hosting the largest emote servers and running the Discord subreddit secretly themselves. They were always really shitty.

      • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 day

        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.

        • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1 hour

          Dumbest comment today.

          Want to blame someone? Blame a farmer. We were doing fine until we invented agriculture.

          But just like the tech worker, farmers today are not to blame for the problems introduced in the past.

            • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zipEnglish
              27 minutes

              So you don’t understand why agriculture is the root of all our problems?

              What exactly is “honest work”? Commenting bullshit on Lemmy like you? Using, I don’t know, technology that someone made, so you support that kind of work?

              I missed a good old troll in the wild. Thanks.

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
          21 hours

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

          As a tech worker, I resent that comment.

          As someone who volunteered time over 20 years to maintain a well-used open-source project, I think your comment is a cheap generalization that shows remarkably low forethought.

          As someone who knows what a comma splice is, though, I guess it’s all good.

          • Khanzarate@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8 hours

            Tech workers keep the modern planet running.

            Do I regret the modern world frequently? Yes. But that’s like blaming the mechanic for a drunk driving accident.

        • neatchee@piefed.socialEnglish
          1 day

          “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
            23 hours

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

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      20 hours

      Back in my day we figured out how to take care of this without getting mom and dad involved. Lol

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.comEnglish
        15 hours

        For real… just make a new account. It’s fucking discord. It’s not like some game where you lose progress or something.

        • Khanzarate@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8 hours

          I don’t have proof, naturally, but I got the sense the friends they were losing were friends made on the platform. With the account being lost suddenly, there’s a good chance they didn’t have backup contact info for them.

          • PhoenixDog@lemmy.worldEnglish
            39 minutes

            If only there were certain channels you joined that those names would still be there and you could just request access again on a new account and reunite with those friends.

            Alas, that is just a shooting star.

    • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
      5 hours

      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 was hacked. In fact, that happens all the time.

      • 1D10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13 hours

        It’s probably because we tell kids about how dangerous scams are and all the problems that can occur, but we don’t teach ways to mitigate the issue when it does occur, the child was probably worried that all of their friends would fall for the scam and everyone would get in trouble, it honestly sounds like she was more concerned for her friends then she was about her discord account.

        I’ve had adults act pretty much just like this, they are not well versed in how shit works but hear all the scary stories, so if things go a little wrong it is terrifying.

        • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
          5 hours

          Remember, kids: If we taught you how to protect your privacy and recover from things like this, you’d also learn how to get around the censorship we impose upon you so stay in the dark and suffer.

      • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24 hours

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

        • merc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3 hours

          It must be a lot of friends who don’t all know each-other too.

          If it’s a bunch of friends on one discord server, surely it’s not too hard to get back on to that same server and say “my account was hacked”. But, if you have dozens of friends spread across many servers, you might not even remember the servers.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
        1 day

        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.

        • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
          20 hours

          This is how Discord works.

          I’ve two separate friends who lost access to their accounts. One lost it via hacking or social engineering, and the other lost access because their mail service shut down. Both long time users, with the subscription bullshit.

          Both struggled with support, neither got their accounts back. Both made new accounts and continued paying the subscription. Absolutely bonkers.

    • phx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      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

        • CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          20 hours

          Not just “ID” but a fucking birth certificate.

          Which, of all the documents that can be faked, it’s that one.

          No picture. Just a piece of paper with a name, weight and parents’ names.

            • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              11 hours

              You could even fake one from a country that no longer exists. Are they really going to verify a birth certificate from Czechoslovakia?

              • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
                3 hours

                Or do a little more research and find somewhere that the infrastructure was so trashed by war or natural disaster that some records are completely gone. Happened a lot in WWII, and it must have happened in other places since.

      • 1D10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13 hours

        Lol I was going to say it sounds like all the AI shit that’s posted to the “today I fucked up” forums all it needed was a couple " I turned my phone off because it was blowing up" and oddly similar and unnecessarily given ages.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      1 day

      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.

    • je_skirata@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1 day

      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”

    • lemonhead2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      discord now has ads btw. the ads are gonna become more annoying as we go along

      • 1D10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13 hours

        The problem will always be that companies and organizations will still use it as a primary communication platform, same issue with Twitter and face book, I have left all those platforms but still have sock puppet accounts so that I can access information that is difficult to find elsewhere. It’s kind of a never ending cycle.

        We need a group of talented people who want to start making nonprofit social media platforms, but then maintain them in such a way that it attracts the companies, and organizations that currently use the for profit sites.

        • HuudaHarkiten@piefed.socialEnglish
          13 hours

          If a company only communicates through facebook, discord etc, that company doesn’t exist for me. So far, I haven’t had any issues in my life because of it.