Dad stuck in support nightmare after teen lied about age on Discord
arstechnica.com
Data dump confirms dad's suspicions that Discord knew teen's age prior to hack.

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.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
    12·
    13 hours ago

    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.

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      This is how Discord works.

      I’ve two separate friends who lost access to their accounts. One lost it via hacking or social engineering, and the other lost access because their mail service shut down. Both long time users, with the subscription bullshit.

      Both struggled with support, neither got their accounts back. Both made new accounts and continued paying the subscription. Absolutely bonkers.