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.
Amazing parenting to let them hurt themselves and their friends because you couldn’t educate them well enough to avoid a scam.
Edit: I am not saying the parent should have educated the child better, I am just saying when you go down this path of “well you should have known better” then the responsibility is on the parents to teach the kids better.
Well our parents were/are mostly tech illiterate, were they also bad parents because they couldn’t educate us on it? The new generation have 100x the ability to self educate than we did as well.
That’s the point. We should not make our children feel bad for not knowing better when we ourselves aren’t doing any better. Show some fucking empathy instead of saying you’re shit out of luck.
It’s not about education, it’s often something you need to learn the hard way. It’s way too easy to be distracted or busy and hit a bad link. Losing access to a discord account hardly counts as hurt, unless it’s linked to bank stuff.