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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/dad-stuck-in-support-nightmare-after-teen-lied-about-age-on-discord/ [arstechnica.com]

Brady Frey did not realize that his daughter lied about her age when she set up her Discord account. He only found out after her account got hacked and he got trapped in a spiraling support nightmare while trying to stop the hacker from targeting dozens of her young friends with financial extortion scams.

When Frey’s daughter signed up for Discord, she was 12 and technically not old enough to have an account.
[...]
Hiding her age, she created an account that listed her as over 18 years old.

Now 13, the teen had been happily using the app for months when she suddenly got locked out of her account after clicking on a link from an attacker posing as Discord support. Since she didn’t enable two-factor authentication, the attacker was able to commandeer the account.
[...]
Discord’s chatbot, Clyde, and a seeming human support member, Nelly, automatically closed her support tickets after telling her it would be best to report the issue from inside the app, which she could not access.

Frey told Ars he was shocked to see a platform as big as Discord relying on such poor support infrastructure.

“There’s no pathway for a parent to step in and advocate for a minor whose account has been compromised,” Frey told Ars.
[...]
the hacker wasn’t booted until Ars intervened.

Logging back into the account and surveying the damage, Frey told Ars that 38 of his daughter’s friends were targeted with a social engineering scam that Bitdefender reported in February is “widespread” on Discord.
[...]
Most of the friends seemingly did not fall for the scam, but two users appeared to have taken the bait, Frey told Ars.
[...]
In the future, Discord plans to roll out global age checks [arstechnica.com] that would rely on AI and other methods [arstechnica.com] to detect and verify users like Frey’s daughter, who should be marked as a teen. But in the meantime, Frey’s experience shows “what happens after a minor in real life is compromised and a parent tries to get help,” Frey said.

On top of repeated issues with the support forum, “Discord’s in-app reporting tools failed repeatedly,” he told Ars.
[...]
Seeking answers he couldn’t get from Discord’s support forum, he requested her data from Discord and soon confirmed his suspicions: The platform had labeled his daughter as a teen internally days before the hack occurred.
[...]
After receiving the data dump on his daughter’s Discord account, a couple of things stuck out immediately as odd to Frey.

“There’s no age recorded at signup, but there’s something worth flagging: her data includes an age_group field set to ’13–17,’ confirming Discord’s system knows she’s a teen,” Frey told Ars.
[...]
Additionally, Frey noticed that a separate field, “is_underage,” was set to “false.” He told Ars that he thinks that “discrepancy matters because the underage flag likely controls whether stricter ad protections” for kids are “applied.”

Since his daughter set up the account with an 18+ setting, it’s possible that the field corresponded to her self-reported age.
[...]
Seemingly, that meant that the platform could create “a detailed behavioral ad profile” on the teen, even though its internal system had categorized her in the 13–17 age group, Frey said.

Samantha Baldwin, a policy and research staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars that Discord’s hesitancy to formally update the age setting is telling. Frey’s case shows why privacy advocates believe that age verification laws aren’t about “protecting children” but about “surveillance and censorship,” she said.

“That they would not recategorize a minor’s account demonstrates this clearly,” Baldwin said.
[...]
EFF has long warned [eff.org] against age-gating the Internet
[...]
Discord plans to stop collecting as many IDs and rely on new technology, like on-device face scans and age signals, to detect when users are lying about their ages as global age checks roll out later this year. But any time a user appeals their age estimation, Discord would still require an ID.
[...]
After weeks of begging for support, the teen was clearly exasperated when she tried to share her passport, and Discord support did not accept it and instead asked for a face scan. The chatbot Clyde seemingly messed up when prompting her to verify her age with k-ID, which Discord uses in some regions but not in the US currently.

“Please reopen the ticket, it is not about the Face Scan,” the teen said.

But the ticket wasn’t reopened until Ars poked Discord one last time.
[...]
Please reopen the ticket. The automatic close is incorrect, just like it was wrong on the other tickets over the past month.”

Original Submission