UK kids are bypassing age verification by drawing on fake mustaches

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Kids in the UK are finding ways around online age checks by drawing fake mustaches on themselves, fooling the facial recognition technology.

A recent Internet Matters report found that about one-third of children have bypassed online age verification systems in the last couple of months.

A recent report, “The Online Safety Act: Are Children Safer Online?”, asked 1,270 children and their parents throughout the UK about whether the country’s online safety laws are actually protecting young people.

Surprisingly, about one in three children are finding ways around age checks, sometimes with tricks as easy as drawing fake mustaches on themselves.

Kids use fake mustaches to bypass UK’s age filters

A mother recently shared that her 12-year-old son tried to trick a website’s age verification system by drawing a mustache on his face with an eyebrow pencil.

It reportedly worked, with the system verifying him.

Kids weren’t just using one trick to get around the rules. The report also discovered they were pretending to be older by entering false birthdays, using other people’s IDs, submitting videos of strangers, and even using video game characters to bypass the facial recognition technology.

Researchers learned that some kids are using short video clips of video game characters – like a character simply turning their head – to prove their age online. One 11-year-old girl explained that she’d seen others doing this.

As TopMob reported earlier, they exploited the realistic graphics of Death Stranding and the likeness of the character Sam Porter Bridges to fool facial recognition filters into believing they were Norman Reedus.

The research showed that nearly half of children (46%) think it’s simple to get around age restrictions online, while only a small fraction (17%) feel those checks are hard to overcome.

Okay, so I talked to some older gamers – the 13 and up crowd – and a surprising number, like over half of them, told me they think age verification systems are pretty easy to get around. It’s a bit concerning, honestly.

The report revealed that some parents are enabling their children to get around age restrictions online. About a quarter (26%) admitted to letting their child skip these checks, and 17% actually assisted them in doing so.

These results are based on data collected after the UK’s Online Safety Act took effect in July 2025. The new law requires online platforms to better protect children.

However, not everyone has had a smooth experience. A well-known example is Britain’s most tattooed man, who repeatedly failed online age verification because the system mistook his tattoos for a mask.

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2026-05-05 00:19