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 hope you got the therapy you clearly need. People drop off the internet for all sorts of reasons. I remember bleeding friends because a platform died. It’s just how it is. This can be their lesson learned that you actually need multiple ways to contact your digital friends.
If it were me, I would have been oh well too with my kid. Taking gambles like lying about your age sometimes doesn’t pay off. Sometimes your parents just up and move. Somehow I survived losing digital and IRL friends because of things I had no control over. Learning to cope with that is an adult skill that you everyone eventually needs.
I do get therapy, thanks for the concern random stranger. I hope the same is true for you and that you understand that just because bad things happened to you doesn’t mean we should give such things a free pass and make ourselves emotionally unavailable to empathize with our children.