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.
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.
The company has fallen? From where? Discord was bottom of the barrel for as long as I can remember.
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.
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.
adding AI was that sign.
Literally and this isn’t even a reason for it sucking!
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“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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it’s honestly hard working tech working who are not to blame for much of the problems with technology. Tech bro billionaire broligarchs on the other hand
Never trust a tech worker, they decided long ago to sell out the species and the planet.
The ironic thing is, the tech industry started out from hippie counterculture. Fucking tech-bro business major types ruined it.
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.
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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.
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
The tech sector loves to outsource this kind of thing to traumatized and underpaid people overseas.
And then they geolock you, because the service would be cheaper over there.
They also had Americans working for $1-$2 an hour, too.
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.
I assume these are internet friends, otherwise yeah just talk at school and discuss the scam over phone or whatever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
💯
Back in my day we figured out how to take care of this without getting mom and dad involved. Lol
For real… just make a new account. It’s fucking discord. It’s not like some game where you lose progress or something.
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.
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.
Or if only there were some other way than Discord to have contacts. Or if these kids had some kind of critical thinking skills to think ahead in case something like this happened.
But will somebody please think of our children’s paid for avatars?
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.
Also, the bigger the company, the poorer the enduser-support.
Ditch Discord. If your friends after all these years haven’t set up OOB contact, they’re not friends.
Yeah, that’s why I made a teamspeak and a stroat account
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”
Whoops
discord now has ads btw. the ads are gonna become more annoying as we go along
Really? That sounds awful.
The IRC servers I’m at don’t have ads. Its very nice.
Another reminder to ditch Discord.
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.
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.
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but had to go through an AI support bot that kept closing the ticket
In general, that practice is absolutely disrespectful towards customers and should be met with complete rejection
Any company using AI support is absolutely fucked in the head imo. It’s absolute dogshit.
I had a phone company where I had to call to add a new sim to my account because my previous phone was stolen and the fucking AI says “we have sent you a link via text or how to add a sim. Thank you, good bye.” And it fucking hung up on me.
I didn’t have the phone to get the text because it had been stolen!
To be fair, when AI assisted support it’s done well you don’t even notice. Don’t get me wrong, 99% of support chatbots are useless, lazily implemented, awful to deal with, and just waste human time. Companies should focus on good support, the specific tooling is irrelevant. I’ve dealt with support humans that act like robots and robots that quickly escalate my issue to a human that can solve my problem.
How is this news? Kid got pwned; it’s a learning experience to lose your account because you clicked on an untrusted link. Discord sucks, and their support sucks, but I don’t think they did anything wrong here beyond that.
Shit that’s dystopic!
