Dad Stuck in Support Nightmare After Teen Lied About Age on Discord

Freeman writes:

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

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 that would rely on AI and other methods 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.

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