Kids are getting constantly scammed online too
Online gaming is the new 'Wild West'. But no-one seems to care
Just when you think you’ve figured out the latest tech, everything changes again. It’s exhausting. You’d finally got to grips with Instagram; and at last half-understood TikTok. But now you also need to get to grips with that other alien world young people hang out.
Online gaming!
I’ve tended to avoid the entire subject, which is irresponsible and lazy. I’ve written dozens of articles about online life on this Substack, and zero cover gaming. Too big, too complicated. It’s Instagram circa 2015: a place where kids spend a lot of time, while the adults feel clueless, helpless, and hopeless. But whether you have children or not, gaming is now a part of ‘the culture’, which means everyone should have some basic level of online gaming literacy.
You are probably a gamer anyway, since it covers such a wide and varied spectrum. It’s everything from people playing Candy Crush on their phones mid-commute; to headset-on, semi-professional 10-hour multi-players marathons.
The NSPCC splits online games into four types. But what I’m really talking about here are those which are played online; involve interacting and communicating with other players; and where real money can be spent. You will have heard of some them. Roblox. Minecraft. Call of Duty. But there is a long-tail too, that runs a million games deep. Not to mention the giant secondary market, where countless watch others play.
Gaming is a $10 billion industry in the UK and is growing fast. Globally it’s bigger than music and films combined. There are lots of surveys about how many young people in the UK play online games. A 2023 survey of kids between 3 and 17 found 83 per cent did in the last year. Others put the number higher. The simplest thing to assume is that pretty much everyone under 18 plays online games.
It's hard to express just how important this is. A recent survey found that (thankfully) most kids today would like to be doctors when they grow up. But the fourth most popular choice is ‘gamer’. These surveys are generally a load of nonsense, I agree. But if anyone you know does says they want to become a gamer, gently remind them that becoming a well-paid gamer is about as easy as becoming a well-paid footballer. And even if they do make it, they’ll be retired by 26, because hand/eye reflex starts to slow around 24 anyway.
By the 2030s I expect we’ll see a lot of burnt-out former YouTubers and gamers, empty-eyed, roaming the streets and rambling that they used to be a big deal once.
As a general rule, we in the media are miles off the pace. We don’t cover gaming nearly enough, and we don’t investigate it thoroughly. Certainly not with the obsessive vigour we do with social media companies. That’s because most journalists didn’t grow up gamers; and are too old. The editors and commissioners – who are generally older still – feel ill-equipped to make the difficult editorial and legal judgements. The BBC did finally appoint their first ever Gaming Correspondent a couple of years back – a brilliant journalist called Steffan Powell. He wrote some great stories, including about the positives of the sector. But he’s now left, and I’m not sure if the BBC has replaced him. If they haven’t, it’s a big mistake.
If I was smart (and / or 15 years younger) my next major investigation or podcast would be about money laundering in online gaming sites. There have been a few examples exposed already, like this one from 2019, when a major firm realised the vast majority of sales on their sites was likely criminals laundering money.
It’s a pretty obvious way to do it. Launderers buy in-game currencies and merch using pre-paid credit cards. They then put them up for sale (for real money) on the game’s internal marketplace. Simple!
I’ve been at events where the police hint this is happening on a grand scale, and they don’t have the expertise to deal with it. Here’s a tip for any police reading this: every year you recruit thousands of people in their early twenties, who likely grew up gaming. Find out what games they played and how good they were. Viola – there’s you online gaming criminal investigations unit!
Unsurprisingly a recent survey of under 17s found the vast majority believe gaming is good for them. Well they would say that. There is a pretty large body of research which suggests these kids are not entirely objective.
Most parents are now aware that any multi-player online game can bring kids into contact with adults. Take Roblox, a wildly popular, online gaming platform that allows users to play games designed by other users. PC Mag reckons the site has decent safety settings. Not everyone agrees. Bloomberg recently published an expose about how Roblox tries to fight paedophiles on the site, ‘and is not always winning’. According to Bloomberg’s own analysis, since 2018 US police have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox.
One of many many many user created Roblox games
There are even dedicated YouTuber vigilantes, like Ruben Sim, who spend their time trying to expose the dark corners of Roblox. Places, they say, the mainstream media totally ignore. And they’re mostly right. We do ignore it.
There’s more problems of course! Like the well documented cases of kids draining their parents’ accounts to buy in-game stuff on Fifa or Amazon. And Prince Harry isn’t the only person who reckons Fortnite: Battle Royale should be banned because it is addictive, and violent. In fact, there is now an NHS unit dedicated to internet gaming and addiction, which has treated hundreds of people. The average age is 17.
Despite all this, and a hundred other problems, I am not decisively ‘anti-gaming’. A few years ago then Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote of young gamers: “They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious...These machines teach them nothing.” But there is a fair amount of research that suggests the opposite: gaming helps develop communication, teamwork, strategic thinking, collaboration, imagination, resourcefulness and adaptability among gamers.
Besides, most societies are spiritually conservative and are slow to recognise talent in unusual places. The result is a huge amount of squandered talent. One day Fortnite kill ratios might join ‘Microsoft’ and ‘Basic French’ on Curriculum Vitaes. In some jobs, it might even be front and centre. Presumably the quality of our future armies – increasingly fighting with remote drones and robots - might depend on how well we can recruit gamers into the military. I expect the greatest players will be directly approached by the navy or airforce. How about this for your next career: head of insight for military gaming analysis. The military used to spend millions developing theories and battle plans: but soon they will simply hack into the servers of Fortnite and analyse billions of actual games played by actual people. Your job is to develop new theories of attack and defence.
Although we journalists are behind the curve, there are a few decent primers if you want to know more. The NSPCC for example has some sound advice for worried parents. And the gambling commission warns parents about certain online games. Obviously some journalists are more switched on than me, and writing decent stuff. Like this.
There is one aspect of this giant sprawling industry that definitely doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Even though it powers the entire industry.
Money!
Online gaming sits atop an unregulated, complex, financial ecosystem. Forget earning a few quid washing cars and deciding whether to spend it on football stickers or save for later – kids are entering the world of money online, alone. And they find a universe of message board NFT offers and dodgy in-game loot box trades.
Predictably, loads of them are getting scammed, ripped off, and duped. And no-one seems to care.
A few days ago, a subscriber to this newsletter directed me to a recent report about kid’s online spending, called A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight, produced by Parent Zone. They’d worked with the pollsters Ipsos, who’d interviewed over a thousand 13-18 year olds about the subject.
He probably assumed I knew something about the subject, what with me being a technology writer and all. But like the rest of my lazy colleagues, I was head-in-sand. I knew kids spending money online was a thing. (I have some, after all.) But I didn’t realise quite how big of a thing. Nor how much online gaming was central to it.
The report didn’t get much write up in the press, because, as I keep saying, we are clueless.
Here’s a few numbers.
According to the survey, 96 per cent of young people in the UK aged 13-18 have made an online purchase. Collectively they spend an estimated £50 million per week online. A week! So that’s over $2.5billion a year.
True, that £50 million number isn’t just gaming. It covers all sorts of things, including buying stuff on Vinted or Etsy or even Coinbase. (Oh and these young entrepreneurs make money online too. They stream content. They sell skins in-game. They trade crypto).
Roughly half are spending money to play online games. For boys, it’s closer to two-thirds. And the majority think games are only fun when you spend money. I’m afraid to say the era of jumpers-for-goalposts might be over.
Sometimes the money is spent just paying for credits to play. More often it is buying in-game currency (V-Bucks in Fortnite, Roblux in Roblox etc) which can then be spent buying various in-game upgrades and features. It’s amazing how much people can spend. According to a recent report from China, one gamer recently spent over a million dollars on an online character. (Lol).
Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
One popular money drain is the ‘loot box’, a sort of random lottery spin. These contain unseen in-game materials – costumes, skins, weapons. And there is a big secondary market for these loot boxes, including ‘skin betting’ sites where the content of loot boxes can be gambled, with the chance to win real money. Even back in 2017 11 per cent of 11-16 year old had dabbled in skin betting.
All this is wild and unregulated, of course. The really sad part is that so many youngsters are getting ripped off one way or another.
Forty-two per cent of kids have subscribed to something accidentally, been scammed, or lost money. About one in five have been directly scammed. There are about 7 million people aged between 13-18 in the UK. Which means roughly three million of them have lost money online – and well over a million have been directly scammed.
It gets worse. According to Nominet’s Digital Youth Index, 35 per cent of under 18s have experienced an online scam and 14 per cent have experienced identity theft. So nearly a million? When I grew up, identity theft was an exotic crime. I’m sure there were entire TV shows when one person suffered identity theft.
For a decent chunk of them, this is happening in online gaming sites. One common scam involves kids being targeted with phishing messages on chat forums promising ‘free’ in-game currency. (Too many hand over their username and password). Too often gaming life involve kids losing their own meagre savings, or, more often, money from the bank-of-last-resort, the parents.
Some experts suspect these money troubles can serve as a gateway into darker territory: the first element of a sextortion scam or money mule request (where someone receives illicit money in their bank account and transfers it out again at the behest of organised crime.) That sounds right to me. Most scams are multi-faceted.
More generally, who knows what growing up in this unruly money jungle – where NFT scams, weird gambling opportunities or notice-board phishing messages are everywhere – means for a generation’s financial literacy. Or how they develop normal behaviour when it comes to money. Whether it increases the likelihood they develop gambling addiction later in life. No-one knows. At the moment we basically leaving them to it and praying.
Here’s my advice. I’m an advocate of small, manageable actions. The absolute bare minimum is to remember that nearly all online games have parental settings. But they are pointless unless you actually use them, and check them frequently. Specifically, every parent should use any ‘limit chat’ function. Your kids do not need to be reachable by everyone and everyone. Not in SnapChat. And not on Minecraft either. According to Bark, parents with kids on Roblox should do the following.
Log in to the account >.click the gear icon, and then click Settings > On the right-hand side of the Settings page, click Privacy > From here, you can adjust both Contact Settings and Other Settings > If your child is 12 or younger, you can choose Friends or No one. If your child is 13 or older, there are additional options for interaction with other players.
Most online safety is simple! You just need to bother doing it.
General advice about social media usage also applies here. Never let kids play behind closed doors, or after certain hours. Never let them play late unmonitored. And never let them make changes to settings. (Which means you need to keep checking it I’m afraid).
When it comes to the money side of things, things are harder to manage. But one sound tip is never, ever save your payment details to the device your child uses for gaming. So many kids make ‘accidental purchases’ because the sites are designed to encourage friction-free purchases, and it’s not always obvious when something has been bought.
It’s really tough for parents alone to take this all on. Just as it was for social media. In a way the last decade of tech regulations have really all been about one big thing: shifting the burden of responsibility away from parents and onto the companies. The same will be needed here. Fixing this will require some form of concerted action from the gaming firms, the banks, the governments. True, there is a new Online Safety Act that you might have heard about. That covers multi-player online gaming sites, who from next year will need to do more content moderation and risk assessments. But I suspect most journalists won’t pay that much attention to Roblox or Fortnite, preferring to Facebook-watch instead. It’s easier.
Parent Zone recently set up a ‘Child Financial Harms’ consortium along with a load of experts to look into this, and encourage all these different groups to work together. I think they’re worried it will all fall on parents as usual – and it won’t be enough.
While we wait to see what happens with the Online Safety Act and this new consortium, you can at least close the knowledge gap. Most of us don’t understand the jargon, the games, the spending options, the potential for catastrophe. My usual advice applies here too. Don’t ignore these games, and don’t demonise them. Do the opposite. Start playing these games yourself. Every person with an interest in this subject should spend at least a few hours giving it a whirl. Give Fortnite: Battle Royale a go.
This could be you! Dropping in on an island and gaming.
Drop in on the island with 99 other highly skilled players, try to build a fort, find weapons and annihilate the others as the game space around you shrinks. If that’s not your thing, try to build your own game on Roblox.
This is the only way to really understand what’s going on, and what the various financial incentives and traps are. And it all contributes to the most important job for all parents, everywhere: have decent, open and frank conversations about it. Which is only possible when you understand something. And you never know, you might even enjoy it.
Although not Fortnite: Battle Royale. Because you won’t last more than 180 seconds.