Be a Safety Superstar Online!

What children are actually targeted with

Children are not usually targeted for money. They are targeted for accounts, for images, and for access to their parents. Knowing the difference helps, because the advice that follows from it is different from the advice adults need.

• Game account theft. By far the most common. Offers of free currency, skins, or items lead to a fake login page. The account is taken and sold. To a child this is a genuine loss, sometimes of years of progress, and it is often the first time they experience being deceived online.
• Friend-of-a-friend contact. A request from someone who appears to know people they know. Shared-friend lists are easy to fake and make a stranger feel familiar.
• Grooming. The pattern is consistent: attention and flattery, then a move to private messaging, then secrecy from parents, then escalation. Secrecy is the load-bearing part, which is why the most protective thing a parent can do is guarantee that telling them never results in punishment.
• Sextortion. Increasingly aimed at teenage boys. An image is obtained or fabricated, then money is demanded under threat of sharing it. Teenagers are told, and believe, that their life is over. It is not, and the response is to stop paying, keep the evidence, and tell an adult immediately.
• In-game pressure and fake giveaways, which are sometimes ordinary marketing and sometimes fraud, and are hard for children to tell apart.

Rules that work, in the words a child will use

Short rules are remembered. Long ones are not. These five cover most situations:

1. Free stuff online is never free. If it asks you to log in first, it wants your account.
2. Your password is yours. Not even your best friend gets it. Nobody who works for a game will ever ask for it.
3. Secrets from parents are the warning sign. Anyone online who asks you to keep something from your family is the problem, whatever the reason they give.
4. Real friends do not rush you. Pressure to do something now, before you can think or ask, means stop.
5. You can always tell me. You will never be in trouble for it.

That last one is a rule for the adult, not the child, and it is the most important. The single biggest reason children do not report problems is fear of losing their device or their account. A child who is certain they will not be punished tells you while the problem is still small and fixable.

How to have the conversation

Little and often beats one serious talk. A five-minute conversation triggered by something on the news, or by a game they are playing, lands better than a scheduled discussion that feels like a warning.

Ask rather than tell. "Has anyone ever offered you free stuff in a game?" gets you real information; "you know not to talk to strangers online" gets you a yes and nothing else. When they describe something that went wrong, respond to the information rather than to the behaviour — the goal is that they tell you the next time too.

Play the games on this site with them rather than sending them off to play alone. Ask them to explain why something is a scam before they answer. Naming the reason is what converts a reflex into a skill they can transfer to a message you have never seen.

Settings worth checking

• Accounts set to private, with the follower list actually reviewed rather than assumed.
• Chat restricted to friends where the platform allows it, and voice chat with strangers turned off in games.
• Location sharing off, in apps and in the camera.
• Purchases requiring a password or a parent's approval.
• Two-factor authentication on their main gaming account, which is usually the one they would most hate to lose and is therefore the one they will happily protect.

Settings help, but they are not a substitute for the conversation. Children move platforms quickly and find ways around controls; what travels with them is judgement and the confidence that they can tell you anything.

If something has already happened

Stay calm, visibly. Your child is watching your reaction and deciding whether to tell you things in future. Do not delete the evidence — screenshot it first. If money or images are involved, report it to the agency for your country on our reporting page, and to the platform. If images of a child are involved, contact the police; this is not something to handle alone. Reassure them clearly that they are not in trouble and that this is fixable, because from the inside it rarely feels that way.