📱 Discord is not a safe platform, your account is in danger, and you should move to a different platform ASAP

...that would be a very pretentious and misleading statement if I had nothing new to say or back my claims up. But fear not, because your Discord account can indeed be terminated by anyone using a single message you've sent in the past.

👨‍💻 Now, that sounds like a serious vulnerability, and let me tell you it really is. Any message you've sent on Discord can be used against you, even if it was sent years ago.

Today, we will explore how AI usage in moderation systems can lead to one of the most spectacular collapses in the history of message exchanges.

Our story begins on 19th of September 2025, when a colleague of mine was suspended off Discord. An unknown attacker has posted innocent-looking questions on Discord, and upon receiving a response, has modified their messages to disgusting accusations.

The same day, another colleague of mine has received a Discord account suspension the same way. Upon taking a closer look into both attacks, the next discoveries were made:

• attacker modified their own messages
• attacker reported the answers by the victim to Discord Trust and Safety
• Discord did not check the message edit history, and instead issued a permanent account suspension

I could not believe this situation, so I had to experiment. But I did not even know what sort of issue I would stumble upon...

In absolute denial and unable to believe my own eyes, I rushed to purchase several Discord accounts to conclude my own testing.

On 20th of September 2025, I discovered the following Discord exploit, that, to this day, allows you to terminate anyone's Discord account:

1) send a message to the user over Direct Messages or in a public chat. Example: "Hello, how are you doing?"

2) wait for a reply of any kind. Example: "I am doing good, what about you?"

3) modify your message in a way that would directly incriminate the other person. Accuse them of all the bad and illegal things that you can.

4) report their messages. Within 30-120 minutes, their Discord account is permanently suspended for "child safety".

And that... was the point where I realized the hopelessness of the situation. It was that exact moment when I realized just how weak I am compared to the unbearable weight of the situation. Any person I ever interacted with... any chat where I've sent at least a single message... can now be used against me. And there is nothing I could do about it.

In fact, there's nothing anyone could do about it. Discord Customer Support is known for using AI and bots to respond to people. You will never get to a real human being to review your case. If we use the official 2024 "child safety" statistics, we can see that Discord only lifted around 3% of all appealed violations.

But... there was a bit of hope.

The complete exploit details have been disclosed to Discord over multiple channels between 20th and 30th of September. Numerous messages have been sent, including to the official Bug Bounty email listed on Discord website. To this day, there was not a single response from Discord, nothing that would at least acknowledge they received and reviewed the report.

It was evident the only way to bring Discord's attention to this issue was to bring more awareness to the method, instill fear into the userbase, and expose just how insecure Discord is. A decision was made to publish the exploit.

But how to do that? At the time, the most popular media source I had is a YouTube channel with 240 subscribers. On 30th of September 2025, I approached NTTS, a famous YouTube influencer with more than a million subscribers, to cover the issue. I included the complete PoC with a demonstration. But it was clear he is not going to cover an issue that very few people know about.

I've decided to publish the video PoC on my small personal YouTube channel. First 24 hours pass by- and nothing impressive happens. I gain 204 views. Some people leave comments expressing disbelief, accusing me of lying. Some were confused by this video. To them, it was difficult to get a grip on the feeling that their account is not secure. That their entire Internet identity lies in hands of every other person.

Throughout the next 24 hours the video amassed a total of 1800 views. It was an impressive figure for my channel, but the rate of new views was slowing down. I went to sleep, disappointed by my unsuccessful attempt to raise awareness and prevent future disasters...

The next day, I woke up to 15,000 views. That was extremely impressive. Looking at the chart back then, the growth was looking almost parabolic... The video was hitting the algorithms, bringing tens- and then hundreds of comments.

My video got so popular that NTTS fans began collecting more information about the exploit themselves. Just 24 hours after my publication, several huge influencers got their accounts permanently banned using my exploit. People began talking about the insecurity of the platform.

By the end of the 7th day, my video already had more than 173,200 views. Hundreds of individuals were affected. Some people received 8 individual violations on their account as a result of a successful attack. People were in panic. Some reached out to me, asking for help. Commenters stopped asking if it's real or not, and instead were asking "how can we prevent this?"

It was at this point when one affected individual managed to find a reliable way of lifting such incorrectly issued "child safety" violations. The method was nothing new, but the phrasing it used seemed to work exceptionally well. Throughout the next 7 days after that, multiple people reported success lifting the bans - all while my video has already hit a 228,000 view mark on 23rd of October!

My colleagues were not an exception! Both of my friends managed to lift the Discord suspension more than a month after first getting banned. They were finally able to use the platform again, after a month of despair and having already accepted their account is lost.

But it was all over now, right? 😀

Despite my colleagues having been successfully unbanned, in the grand scheme of things, my video did not change anything, really.

On 25th of October, NTTS released the video covering the exploit. It was seen by more than 650,000 individuals. It is the 10th of November now, and Discord has still not patched the issue.

Yes, it means that to this very day, you're still not safe. Discord is still insecure, and there is no reason to believe this issue will ever be fixed. Discord has long moved from a human-ran support to a bot/AI-run help center. It's very likely they're not going back on their decisions, and one should not expect the platform to change for the better at this point.

Innocent people will continue to suffer the consequences of this platform's poor decisions. People will lose their accounts to attacks. And even if there is now a chance to recover the affected account, there is no telling how many people will just never be able to achieve a successful resolution.

• "But Kolya, what can I do now?"

Move from Discord to any other platform. Telegram is slightly less insufferable and does not suffer from AI moderation yet. Signal is a great choice. Self-hosted IRC is a nerdy solution that might not fit everyone, but is definitely an option. Anything will be better than Discord.

Thank you for reading this post and I hope you enjoyed it. We live in a wonderful world, and it is depressing to see corporations allowing such dystopian and anti-human mechanisms to exist.

References:

• my PoC video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfNXsbpSsU
• NTTS video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86LnUk2Dk50
• Lifting the violations method https://paste.nk.ax/api/raw/NaVfz5l3KlyyDouZ