An 8-year-old Had No Trouble Buying An AK-47 Online And Sending It Home

Upbringing

By Jack Hobbs

July 23, 2023 | 4:12 p.m

A woman in the Netherlands recently revealed that her young son once managed to buy an AK-47 on the dark web without her knowledge, calling it “something out of a movie”.

The concerned parent said the dark web purchases started with something small, like “free” pizza, but over time the deliveries have become increasingly horrible.

According to the parents, every time she entered a room, their son used incomprehensible code phrases such as “Pitt is coming to us” to disguise his dealings by communicating with illegal actors via online games.

Gemen claims the hackers also used her son to launder money for others.

It wasn’t until the automatic weapon and ammunition showed up on her doorstep that Gemen realized what was happening was much bigger than she and her son.

“I think he spent a month trying to figure out how to order the gun and have it delivered to our home,” Gemen recalls, explaining that her son had the gun transported from Poland to Bulgaria to avoid customs.

“He opened it up and was really, really excited that he’d managed to get a gun into our home,” she continued. “I was completely shocked. I immediately decided to do things differently at home.”

“My son started chopping at the age of eight. And then he ordered a gun,” Barbra Gemen told Euronews. “He started spending a lot of time behind a computer and started ordering things on the internet without paying.” Twitter According to the parents, every time she entered a room, their son used incomprehensible code phrases to disguise his dealings by communicating with illegal actors via online games. Barbara Gemen / Kaspersky

Gemen said she turned the gun over to local police and that no legal action was taken against her child.

She also noticed a change in her son’s personality, she said. “He started waking up at night to sit behind a computer and he was really stressed. And then we learn that he was working with a group of international hackers.”

In an effort to curb her son’s burgeoning life of crime, Gemen said she’s reached out to law enforcement and her son’s school for advice, but claimed her concerns were dismissed as “exaggeration.”

After law enforcement ignored her concerns, Gemen was forced to research her son’s online story herself. Getty Images/iStockphoto

Gemen took matters into her own hands and decided to look at her son’s browsing history and learn about cybersecurity.

Things reached a breaking point when Gemen’s son revealed that his hacker friends had asked him to help them hack companies and send them stolen information.

According to Gemen, her son immediately told her what was going on and she helped him cut ties with them.

“It’s so easy these days because a lot of kids have laptops and cell phones and you can basically do a hack with a few clicks,” said Gemen, who now works as a cyber-specialist volunteer with the Dutch police. “It’s a pretty big problem to keep young people from hacking. They often don’t know what is legal and what is illegal.”

Along with her now 20-year-old son, who explores the internet, Gemen is currently working with a newly formed Dutch task force called the Cyber Offender Prevention Squad (COPS), she told the Wall Street Journal in July, to educate parents about how easily their children can slip into the dark corners of the internet.

“They don’t realize it can be their own son or daughter,” she told them.

https://nypost.com/2023/07/23/an-8-year-old-had-no-trouble-buying-an-ak-47-online-and-mailing-it-home/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons

Copy the URL to share