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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by cannedtuna@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] riskable@programming.dev 88 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] tabular@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago

I assume these are internet friends, otherwise yeah just talk at school and discuss the scam over phone or whatever.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] 1D10@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] riskable@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

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.

When they don't understand they will trust in the broken support system to save them.

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

The fact that adults still believe in tech support is crazy to me.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 14 points 1 day 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.

[-] Dojan@pawb.social 3 points 1 day 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.

this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
499 points (97.5% liked)

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