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.
The company has always been shit run by shitty people.
Never trust a tech worker, they decided long ago to sell out the species and the planet.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
discord now has ads btw. the ads are gonna become more annoying as we go along
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.
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.
