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.
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
Yeah. It was magically resolved by providing ID.
Hmmm.
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.
How do they even verify my foreign birth certificate?
Like I could just forge one bearing the seal of my former country, how do they even tell if that’s legit?
You could even fake one from a country that no longer exists. Are they really going to verify a birth certificate from Czechoslovakia?
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.
“AI says it’s real”
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.