Teens are outsmarting age checks with hilarious hacks – you won't believe these easy bypasses

Age checks on apps were meant to be a simple safety step. Instead, they have become a running joke online. We’ve rounded up some of the funniest and most creative ways teens are slipping past age verification, and the stories reveal just how easy these systems are to fool (at least right now).

When Roblox began asking users to verify their age for chat and other social features, we documented how it quickly became a huge mess as the AI system wasn’t able to do a good job. Minors were being identified as adults and vice versa. But putting the frustration aside, one of the funniest clips to come out of this has to be that of a minor fooling Roblox’s age verification system into believing they were an adult.

In a viral video recently posted on X, you can see a minor with a sketched-on beard and even a sketched-on unibrow bypassing Roblox’s age verification. What’s more hilarious is that the AI apparently thought they were a whopping 106 years old.

In Australia, new rules to limit social media use for under-16s prompted another round of improvisation. Teens started uploading photos of dogs and other pets. Some verification systems flagged the images as acceptable, effectively treating the animal photo as not clearly underage and defaulting to allow access. Reporting from media outlets and viral social posts captured the surreal scenes of pets receiving more online rights than their owners.

Another teen on TikTok posted a video talking about how she tricked the system by simply sucking in her cheeks during a facial scan for Snapchat.

@ace.writes.stuff I know how to get past the social media ban… #australia #socialmediaban #australiasocialmediaban #under16s #australian ♬ original sound – Ace

One parent even revealed that her 10-year-old kids fooled the AI age-verification on Roblox by making funny faces during the facial scan. Honestly, that should be an embarrassment for Persona, the age verification partner for Roblox and many other platforms.

Gamers are being creative too, and it’s hilarious. After spotting a viral post by @DanySterkhov on X showing how players are using Death Stranding’s photo mode to bypass Discord’s age verification, the folks at PC Gamer gave it a shot and…it worked. Now that’s called being creative!

Some bypasses aren’t as crazy as using pets or sketched on beards, but they’re comically simple. Teens have been using VPNs to appear in countries with laxer rules or recruit parents and older siblings to complete verification. Reports show how fast a simple VPN toggle or a cooperative adult can make an age wall vanish.

At the end of the day, the marker-beard videos and verified-dog memes are an odd mix of satire and stress test. They expose how brittle current tools are and how quickly a generation raised online will treat any gate as a puzzle. Platforms will keep updating. Teens will keep improvising. And the internet will probably keep laughing.

Featured image generated with AI

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.